From eWeek: Will Talkcasts Be Talk of the Town?: “TalkShoe, a small company in Pittsburgh, has created a Web service that allows users to create and join real-time voice conferences that can be extended to thousands of participants using cell phones, regular telephones or VOIP (voice over IP) devices.
Unlike existing Internet conferencing and chat services, TalkShoe’s Talkcasts incorporate both live and recorded telephone-quality voices, are accessible via a full range of phone connection types, integrate voice and chat, and can be made public or private, according to company officials.”

It had to happen: RFID tags in the bar. EWeek reports that a beverage company is now selling an RFID attachment for bottles.

“‘The software converts the tilt into an estimated volume, and the conversion is automatically perfected based on the history of each bottle; hence it becomes more accurate over time and adapts to each bartender’s habits. When the bottle is empty, our sensor knows it and the software readjusts the historical pours of each bottle to the known volume of the bottle,’ said Beverage Metrics CEO David Teller, who said his company has between $5 million and $10 million in annual revenue. ‘Our system reconciles pours to ring-ups and recipes and automatically decides what is a long pour that should be changed to two pours [and] when to combine short pours in sequence.’ “

The BBC have been running an open competition to come up with a redesign for the BBC home page. The winner – Malkovich – has just been announced. There are a lot of interesting things about this: that the BBC outsources its redesign; that the winner incorporates community features in a really comprehensive way; that the separation of content from comment is hardly there at all. Fascinating.

Matthew Hurst has produced an interesting interactive map of the blogosphere on his site, Data Mining. You can click on any of the nodes to be taken to site it represents. The data is a bit out of data as it was gathered in June 2005.

How the net closed on Prescott: the Guardian takes a look at bloggers’ role in the John Prescott saga. “The deputy PM’s latest tangle is the first big British political story to be driven by bloggers, reports Patrick Barkham, while, Guido Fawkes defends their role “

I made a note to myself ages ago about this post from Micro Persuasion which details how to track specific issues through the use of blog search engines (but I forgot to post it!) It seems to me that this is the kind of workflow change journalist today need to make to keep on top of what is happening.

New research from AOP and Deloitte finds publishers much more comfortable about the digital future. On average publishers say digital will make up 40% of revenues by 2012. Advice, distilled from the research, follows….

1. Make it simple Develop and clearly articulate a simple overarching strategy that sets out how your offline, online and mobile offerings interplay. Ensure it delivers incremental value to customers;
2. Know your customer Get to know your customers and grow with them. Don’t ignore the young – they are your future;
3. Profit from personalisation Personalise to provide what customers want at the right price and they will come. Don’t be afraid of breaking your traditional one-to-many publishing model;
4. If you can’t beat them, join them Embrace those who won’t opine about or contribute to your product; they will ultimately enhance and support your brand;
5. Fee or free Look beyond the printed word and focus on the brand at the centerpiece for generating revenue.

Wired has a piece on the perils of online video – usual stuff about unregulated content and youngsters – but there was an amazing fact quoted : YouTube is now getting an average of 50,000 videos a day uploaded!

I came across Pligg, open source community platform at the moment in beta, a while ago but lost sight of it (that will teach me not to blog it in the first place! It looks quite good and the best thing is the licence lets you use it for free and change the software as you see fit.

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the Affero General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users.

Techmeme is alive with comments on  eBay’s decision to bans sellers from using Google Checkout.

The online auction giant updated its Safe Payments policy this week to add Google’s new payment service, Google Checkout to its list of online payment methods not permitted on eBay.