Get Vertical: Topix Relaunch and Viddler Prelaunch
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Written By Reprise Media | August 11, 2006 | Share This
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Here are a couple of vertical tidbits that caught our eye:
Not your father’s video sharing site We know, we know. What does the world need with yet another YouTube clone? So few of these sites actually offer something markedly unique or new. Enter Viddler.
They’re currently in private beta (and not launching public ’til next month), but TechCrunch got an early look and it sounds promising. Remember the oohs and ahhs when Google Video debuted the ability to link directly to a specific moment in a clip? Well, Viddler seems to be making that a mere jumping-off point.
With Viddler, you’ll be able to take any point in a video and link to it, tag it for future searches, and generate discussion about it, effectively giving ‘net video DVD-like chapter breaks. You can also embed a video in a blog or other off-site location and have it start from a specific moment.
Marshall Kirkpatrick says that the “vision for the product is deeply inspired by Flickr,” although thankfully the Viddler people managed to locate the letter ‘e’. The business model will be based on premium features rather than advertising, which could make copyright entanglements less of a headache.
But what have you done for me lately? Plenty, if we’re talking about Topix. They announced this week that their news search now “goes to 11.”
Translation, from the original Tufnel-ese: a blog and news index that goes back a whole year, rivaling the big subscription services like Lexis Nexis; case sensitive search (”all lowercase matches anything, capitalized matches capitalized or all caps, and all caps matches only all caps”); and an interactive histogram marking the frequency of news stories mentioning your search term on a given date in the last 12 months.
For a free service, that’s pretty good. And Topix gets deservedly a little full of itself, even taking a swipe at Big G. Of its new features, they say, “You can’t get this across the street. :-),” as they link to Google News. Not as such, no, but just be careful you don’t provoke road rage.
Topics: Search: Vertical |