Google, Bing & Yahoo's New Schema.org Creates New Standards for Web Content Markup

The Web's three leading search companies are announcing today a new collaboration called Schema.org, where more than 100 new types of website markup for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more will allow search engines to better understand and present what they find on the pages that show up in search results. Yahoo announced the project first today on its Yahoo Search Blog and said it was reminiscent of all three search companies collaborating to create the sitemap concept.

This will change the way people design websites, it will change the way people do search marketing, it will change a lot of things. It should be very, very interesting.

The work is related to Yahoo's years-old Search Monkey project, where website owners were given guidance about how to mark up websites so that their appearances in Yahoo search results were vastly improved. Gone are the days of a blue link and a few lines of text in each and every case. Some types of discovered content are better displayed in other ways, with charts, graphs or images, for example. Now that Google and Bing are teaming up with Yahoo to create a standard format, I expect that just about every site on the Web will be stopping to take a look and see how they can incorporate the new structure advocated on Schema.org.

Above, a screenshot of the kind of search results Google has displayed since offering its Rich Snippets markup documentation. In this case, it will be easy to know what the cooking time for this recipe is because "cookTime" is one of 10 standardized fields in the recipe schema under schema.org, so there's one standardized way to communicate cook time for a recipe and every third party indexing a recipe Web page will know what the cooking time is immediately.
Bing says of the project:

"We've made great progress on the technical front to begin to model the real world from the messy bits of data scattered across the web. Things like movies have benefitted from this work. We're now able to understand 'Casablanca' is a movie and literally mine the web to re-assemble information about that movie from millions of sites. But we think we can do better. We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites. Rather than rely solely on machine learning and other AI techniques, we asked "what if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?...We at Bing see this as a major step forward for the web, simplification for webmasters and richer more informative search results for consumers. As search continues to evolve from finding links to taking action, we're excited about the potential this new system provides."

Google's take on the announcement is the most detailed and can be found here.
Here's how I understand such work: technical standards like standardized markup for content types allows search engines and other sites to skip spending time and work figuring out what kind of content is on a page and move directly to the stage of doing something interesting with that content.
It's not easy for a Web service to know that a page is about food, or wine or a movie - but if all pages that are communicate that in a standard fashion, then 3rd parties like search engines can proceed directly to building beautiful food, wine and movie search results pages or other services that present the content in a more compelling fashion. That could make searching more pleasurable and useful and ultimately drives more traffic to the most useful and best formatted sites in the search results.

Google Acquires Postrank: A Fork in the Road for the Future of Social Media

One of my favorite startups in the world, Postrank, has been acquired by Google. Here at ReadWriteWeb we use Postrank every day and if Google shuts it down I am going to be sick. New account creation has already been shut off and a shell of the technology is most likely to become a part of Google Analytics.

Here's what Postrank does: you plug in any RSS feed to the system and it scores each post in that feed by the relative number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves on Delicious and other social media metrics. Then you can subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most-discussed items in any feed. It's magic, it's gold and it's all too often unappreciated. Unfortunately, the company hardly focuses on that aspect of its business anymore. his deal could go one of two ways, very good or very bad, not just for Postrank but for its users and users of the entire social Web.

That core value proposition of Postrank, filtering various blogs for hot posts, has been moved to the background in favor of social media analytics of a publisher's own content. That, presumably, is what Google is interested in and will become a part of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is going to become a far more important product in the future than it is today; and it's already pretty important today.

We use Postrank here at ReadWriteWeb to find hot topics of conversation in the haystack of hundreds of niche specialist blogs on topics like geolocation, big data and education. We use Postrank to determine which of the blogs on those topics get the most traction in a given week, to determine what a newly discovered blog's audience is most responsive to, what a blog's greatest hits have been, or with blog search feeds run through Postrank what blog mentions of a keyword have seen the most social media traction.
I once helped a recruiter search for her client company's name in Google Blogsearch. Then, we put the results through Postrank to see who wrote about the company and which items got the most traction. Those were potential recruiting targets.
I have more than twenty art and design blogs run through Postrank and then through an RSS-to-IM service, when one of their articles gets particularly hot. Those are great to read and fun to share on Twitter.
I once built a blog search aggregator for Sun Microsystems' annual conference using the now Yahoo-acquired Dapper to clean up blog search feed output and Postrank to populate a "hottest posts" widget next to the "newest posts" widgets for each of 15 topics. Sun liked that project so much they flew me down to the event and let me meet musical hero and surprise event guest Neil Young. Postrank helped me meet Neil Young - whose music I've listened to during some very trying times.
I built a mobile Web app for designers a few months ago and used Postrank-filtered blog feeds to populate a topical widget of all the hottest articles in the field, along with Dribble screenshots and Tweets from top designers.
I'm going to have a conversation with someone about a topic I don't know a lot about this afternoon, and I'm going to study up quickly by reading the most-discussed blog posts from the most-engaged-with blogs covering that topic.
I once had a dream, I don't remember if I was awake or asleep, of building OPML files of the top blogs in every country on earth, running them through Postrank to filter for the hottest topics being discussed, and giving those files to the Obama administration as a tool for international diplomacy. That was just a dream, but it wouldn't have been hard to create.
There area few of the incredible possibilities that a service like this makes possible, a service that focuses on listening to other people. Not just listening to what other people are saying about you.
If social media is reduced from a world where anyone can speak and anyone can be heard to a world where we only listen to what people are saying about us or our companies, with each voice ranked for influence score and ignored if it doesn't score high enough, then I think some of humanity's lowest instincts will have triumphed over one of our most potent opportunities to use technology to better human relations.
Please don't kill the part of Postrank, Google, that is focused on tuning our attention to the incredible Web around us.

Syria Shuts Off Internet

Today, Syria joined the lengthening list of countries who have cut themselves off from the world and their own people by turning off its Internet. In the words of Freedom House:

"In a bid to limit Syrians' access to information and keep the outside world from learning the full truth about the government's campaign of violence, Syrian authorities shut down internet access and cell phone networks early this morning, with the exception of certain government services."

Since March, when the Arab Spring hit Syria, government authorities have killed 1,100 Syrians (40 of them today) and jailed 10,000. Even with that casualty count, they keep coming. So, like the Mubarak regime in Egypt in its most desperate days, and like the Libyan regime a month later, Syria has vainly turned off its Internet, hoping to sever the people's connection to each other and to the world.
According to Rensys:

"Starting at 3:35 UTC today (6:35am local time), approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table."

Because the vast majority of Syrian Internet is through one provider and is carried out of Syria by a submarine cable to Cyprus, closing it down must have been fairly easy. The fear is that this is a curtain being drawn across an atrocity of the scale of  Hama.
Ammar Abdulhammid, a Syrian poet and thinker told me, "The information revolution makes it difficult to hide massacres, and images of violence tend to enrage rather than terrorize and could force world to intervene."
The images of Hamza Al-Khatib,a 13-year-old boy murdered and possibly tortured by Syrian security has certainly enraged Syrians; and, given how many ways Egyptians and Libyans found to get the word out even with the Internet compromised, an attempt to hide a massacre might not work anyway, on a simple technical level.
If history is any indication, it will not work.

86% of Android Devices Run Eclair or Froyo

 

Nearly two-thirds (64.6%) of all Android devices run Android 2.2 or Froyo, and another 21.2% run Android 2.1 or Eclair, according to the latest data from Android Developers.

Last time we’ve looked at this data, Android 2.3/2.3.3 or Gingerbread was just a blip on the radar, but now it’s running on a respectable 9.6% of all Android devices.
For Android developers, the current state of affairs means that they can pretty much forget about supporting now obsolete versions of Android — 1.5 and 1.6 — which are now present on a very small number of devices. However, as far as platform fragmentation goes, the situation is about to get ugly: Eclair is still widely used, Froyo isn’t going anywhere, and Gingerbread is slowly gaining momentum.
Add to that two versions of Honeycomb (3.0 and 3.1), the Android flavor aimed specifically at tablets, and you’ve got a lot of Android variants to support. Luckily, the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), slated for a late 2011 release, will consolidate Honeycomb and the “regular” Android variants into one version, which should reduce confusion and ease the fragmentation issues of Google’s mobile platform.

Twitter.com Adds Content From Amazon, Foursquare, Meetup & More

Amazon, AOL Video, Gowalla, Foursquare, Meetup and Plancast are the newest social tools to be integrated with Twitter.com, allowing users to access more multimedia content without leaving the site.
When Twitter unveiled #NewTwitter last year, one of its big selling points was its direct integration with third-party tools such as DailyBooth, iTunes, Ustream, YouTube and TwitPic.
It gave users the ability to see images or watch videos directly in their Twitter stream as long as a link from a supported service appeared in the tweet.
In December, Twitter added five more services to the roster of supported platforms: Blip.tv, Instagram, Slideshare, Rdio and Dipdive.
Now Twitter.com supports six more third-party services within the stream. Whenever your friends tweet out a link from Foursquare, Gowalla, Amazon, Meetup, Plancast or AOL Video, multimedia from that service will appear. Twitter seems to be in the process of rolling out the new integrations now. You can check out an example of it here.
Since the launch of #NewTwitter, several startups have created tools for embedding third-party content into the Twitter stream. Y Combinator-backed Embedly launched Parrotfish earlier this year, a browser plugin that pulls in Internet media and embeds it onto Twitter.com.
What do you think of the new services Twitter has added to the stream? Does it make you more likely to use Twitter.com? Let us know in the comments below.