Matthew Harman

The Knight News Challenge recently extended its online submission deadline to December 15th to attract a broader applicant pool, particularly targeting software developers and entrepreneurs. The fourth annual Knight News Challenge (www.newschallenge.org), sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, awards up to $5 million a year for innovative uses of digital technology aimed at helping to transform news and information sharing. The competition is currently accepting applications and previous winners have included several members of the Drupal community. - Matthew Harman

Over the past year, Facebook Connect has brought an end to lengthy registration processes on many websites, provided a new way to interact with your News Feed on sites like Yahoo!, MSN and iGoogle, and empowered you to take your Facebook identity and friends to technologies such as Nintendo DSi, Xbox and iPhone apps. - Matthew Harman

When it comes to Facebook’s traffic in the United States, analytics firm Compete has an interesting record. The company has released its November numbers for web sites in the US, and here’s a look at what it shows happening to Facebook now. - Matthew Harman

Google Analytics now provides a new Asynchronous Tracking Code snippet as an alternate way to track your website! Think of the asynchronous tracking code snippet as a script that uses a "separate lane" to handle part of the processing of your webpage. As the number of cars (or in this case, scripts on your webpage) increases, the asynchronous tracker uses this lane to reduce webpage load time. Websites that use many scripts or rely on rich media content will especially benefit from this new method, but even lightweight sites will see improvements. - Matthew Harman

Make no mistake. I think real time search is indeed one of the most exciting developments that’s happened in the search space in years. But I also think search engines are acting a bit like cats getting a sniff of catnip. They’re high on real time search and acting kind of crazy. - Matthew Harman

There's been no shortage of talk recently about the "future of news." Should publishers charge for news online? How do they replace lost sources of revenue such as classified ads? How will accountability journalism endure? And, even more fundamentally, will news survive in the digital era? These are questions we're deeply interested in, and we've been exploring potential solutions. But what's often overlooked in these debates is the nature of the news story itself and the experience of how it's read online. We believe it's just as important to experiment with how news organizations can take advantage of the web to tell stories in new ways — ways that simply aren't possible offline. - Matthew Harman

In an interview with TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington at LeWeb today, Google's Marissa Mayer discussed some of the new product that Google announced over the last year, including the recent integration of real-time news streams into the default search pages, Google Music Search and Google Wave. Talking about the future of search, Mayer expects that people will soon do searches by talking to their phones, or through services like the newly announced Google Goggles. - Matthew Harman

Jack Herrick knows a bit about Demand Media, one of the top 20 web properties in the U.S. and the subject of several ReadWriteWeb articles about sites that are pumping thousands of pieces of content into the Web every day. Herrick sold the business he founded, eHow, to Demand Media in 2006. eHow is one of Demand Media's flagship properties, but Herrick became frustrated with the focus on quantity over quality. So he created another business, wikiHow, which he claims produces higher quality articles. - Matthew Harman

Facebook users who don’t adjust their privacy settings will begin publishing their status updates and photos to the entire internet Wednesday, a change made by Facebook in its simplification of its privacy tools in order to keep up with the popularity of micro-publishing sites like Twitter. - Matthew Harman

Google turned on real-time search on its main site this morning with little fanfare, after a huge announcement and demo earlier this week. Go to google.com and search for a news query (Obama Nobel will work) or for something like "marshallk on twitter" and you'll see a live streaming section of the page displaying messages from Twitter, newly updated web pages and other real-time information. - Matthew Harman

What can we learn about usability… - Matthew Harman

A little holiday cheer from the New York Times (NYT), which says things are getting less miserable than they have been for the publisher. - Matthew Harman

Google Chrome may be the best browser on the market. It's faster and more stable than Firefox and today began opening up to user modification with the availability of more than 300 browser extensions. Official Mac and Linux versions were just made available today as well. - Matthew Harman

I’m still get ting out from under the atomic dust bin that is my home office. It’s been an insanely busy year, from the relaunch of Socialmedia.biz as a dis trib uted con sult ing firm to the launch of Socialbrite.org as a non profit learn ing hub to my orga niz ing the Trav el ing Geeks trip to Lon don last July, so I’m just now get ting to a num ber of fan tas tic video inter views I should have pub lished weeks ago. - Matthew Harman

Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it - the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it's raised a nice round of funding, $7 million from CNN, the super-hip VC at Union Square Ventures, real-time savvy VC shop Betaworks and several other organizations. Both of the aforementioned are existing investors re-investing. - Matthew Harman

“Realtime” is the hot buzzword right now, and Google and MySpace appear set to further it along with a new agreement that will see Google serve up search results from MySpace in realtime. What these means is that all publicly available data that’s on MySpace will be available to Google within seconds, we’ve learned. This will include not only status updates, but also elements like pictures and blog posts as well, apparently. - Matthew Harman

In June of 2008, 31% of the Digg front page was controlled by 10 users and 51% was controlled by the top 30. - Matthew Harman

As part of Google’s wide-ranging announcement today about new real-time search features, it says it will begin showing the real-time results of public content that appears on Facebook Pages. This specifically means that any brand, famous individual or other Page owner who shares status updates or media like videos or photos from their Page will get this content showing up in real-time Google search results, which could increase SEO traffic for Facebook Pages. - Matthew Harman

Google said Monday it will begin indexing much of the web in real time, and marry those results with its relevance-ranking technology to make sense of the torrents of information being published via Twitter, Facebook and blogs. - Matthew Harman

On Friday afternoon, Google made the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines, and the world largely yawned. Maybe Google timed its announcement that it was personalizing everyone’s search results just right, so few would notice. Maybe no one really understood how significant the change was. Whatever the reason, it was a huge development and deserves much more attention than it has received so far. - Matthew Harman

Google is holding a major demo event at the Computer History Museum today and unveiled a number of incredible new features. It was the kind of event that restores a person's faith in Google as a major innovator. From voice search and translation, to location and visual search, here are the five most impressive technologies unveiled so far. - Matthew Harman

More companies are starting to give employees greater control over the computers they use in the workplace, according to a new report out Monday from Gartner (IT). - Matthew Harman

Google is turning its sights squarely on the local ad market, with plans to promote its local business listings in storefronts around the U.S. - Matthew Harman

According to our sources at Citysearch, Twitter is opening a new Sign-Up API. - Matthew Harman

I recently did site reviews for several content and information-oriented web sites. My role was to offer optimization recommendations for search engines and better rankings. The problem was that there was no actual information architecture other than categories for the content on the websites. The content, in the form of blog posts, articles, news stories, videos or photo galleries was jam packed with all manner of banners, blinking ads in assorted sizes and colors, video with no user controls to stop sound or movement and slider ads that covered up content until it was clicked away. - Matthew Harman

Beginning today, Google will now personalize the search results of anyone who uses its search engine, regardless of whether they’ve opted-in to a previously existing personalization feature. Searchers will have the ability to opt-out completely, and there are various protections designed to safeguard privacy. However, being opt-out rather than opt-in will likely raise some concerns. The company has an announcement here. Below, a deeper look. - Matthew Harman

Hour of day bidding, or dayparting, has been the topic of much discussion of late. Advertisers want to leverage every possible trend to maximize their profits, and one way to do this is to take advantage of search engines providing advertisers with the flexibility to run their campaigns with bidding by hour of day. With such flexibility in bidding, it is natural to assume that hour of day bidding would be a big advantage. However, a careful analysis of the data shows that this is not the case for most advertisers. To illustrate, here’s a chart of hour of day revenue per click for the query “car hire:” - Matthew Harman

Favrd, a site which aggregated the most popular starred tweets, has closed down. The site was a favorite of Twitter humorists, people who use Twitter mainly to express their wit. Favrd was the first of its kind to repurpose Twitter favorites (stars) into an aggregation site, where users could see who had "faved" their tweets, view tweets with 3 or more faves as a real-time feed, and check the most faved tweets in a 24-hour period on the Leaderboard. It was kind of like the Techmeme of funny tweets. - Matthew Harman

The local space is heating up, with the number of hyperlocal news startups growing by the month and the big-three portals also doubling down. Given their big traffic numbers and financial might, it’s with the big portals that things could get interesting. AOL (NYSE: TWX), MSN and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) have all talked loudly about wanting to attract a bigger share of local online advertising dollars—a market that is expected to grow 12 percent this year alone. But the big players are going about it in different ways. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Yahoo are both building pages that customize aggregated information depending on a user’s location, while AOL is also going for original content. - Matthew Harman

Google has added a few new features in hopes of attracting more users to Google Finance, blending financial stories from Google News right into the mix. - Matthew Harman