What the Hashtag?! - the user-editable encyclopedia for Twitter. What The Trend? Find out WHY terms are trending on Twitter. Layoff Tracker. Today, CBS Interactive is laying off people across several of its properties, I’ve confirmed with the company. CBS is not saying which divisions or how many people are affected.
It is positioning the layoffs as part of the integration process it began six months ago when it bought CNET for $1.8 billion. But it is not just the CNET businesses that are being cut. I’ve also confirmed that earlier today employees at social music site Last.FM were let go. CBS bought Last.fm in 2007 for $280 million . One source puts the number of layoffs at as many as 40 people, mostly from LAst.FM’s London HQ, which has a total staff of 95 . Last.fm never really became a big money maker from what I can gather, and all of those engineers and other staff members are not cheap. If you know which other CBS Interactive divisions are going through layoffs today or the total number of layoffs, leave us a tip and we will add it to our Layoff Tracker . Google Launches Its Own Memetracker. Google has just launched a new homepage for its blog search that bears a strong resemblance to Techmeme, Memeorandum and their “memetracker” counterparts.
The site displays a listing of the top stories from across a variety of topics including business, politics, technology, and entertainment. Memetrackers identify emerging trends on the web, especially across blogs. They are often the best way to learn about breaking news stories, as they can automatically monitor hundreds (or more) news sources at once. Major news outlets and user-submitted content sites like Digg often trail memetrackers by days. Google may well be able to leverage some of the technology it has developed for Google News, which identifies emerging news stories across thousands of sites run by newspapers, television stations, and other media sites.
Google may be able to create a useful tool, but that may not be enough to overcome the established leaders in this space. TV, Meet the Web. Google Analytics Starts Measuring TV Ads. Google’s experiment with selling and measuring TV ads on the Dish satellite network just got a lot more interesting. A month ago, Google incorporated the ability to buy TV ads into AdWords. Now, it is taking all of that ad impression data and layering it on top of Google Analytics (click on the screen shot above for a larger image). This is very basic and imperfect, but it hints at the future of how advertising will be measured: all in the same place.
Within Google Analytics, which many companies already use as a dashboard to measure their Website traffic and the effectiveness their online Google ad campaigns, it is now possible to also measure the effectiveness of your Google TV ads. While the two are not always directly correlated, if the point of the TV ads is to drive Website traffic, at least advertisers can now eyeball whether any corresponding spikes occur after they run their TV ads. Google can only place TV ads on Dish boxes at this point, so its reach is limited. Alert Thingy 1.3 Released: Single User Interface For Twitter And. Note: Unless you are a Twitter and/or FriendFeed addict, this post isn’t for you. Twitter/FriendFeed desktop client Alert Thingy just released version 1.3 of the software. It is now a fully functioning client for both services (reading and writing). They’ve also added an easy Flickr uploader – just drag a photo into the application and upload it to Flickr.
The thing I like most about the new version of Alert Thingy though is that you access Twitter and FriendFeed in a single window and a single interface (Twhirl, a competitor, requires two windows). That means less desktop space is used. They are also de-duping Twitter messages (since they also appear in FriendFeed), a nice touch. Switching between Alert Thingy, Twhirl and even the newer browser sidebar with similar functionality is trivially easy – there are no real switching costs. Im now planning to switch back to Alert Thingy based on the new features.