When you go on vacation, you no longer pack canisters of film for taking vacation photos - you just pack a digital camera and a handful of batteries. If the hotel has wi-fi, you might even upload photos from the day's activities to flickr in the evening. However, when it comes time to send postcards back home, you still have to browse through the assorted offerings from the gift shop, emblazoned with hokey "wish you were here" sentiments overtop images that look nothing like the place you're visiting.

In this post we look at web 2.0 services that give you more options with digital photos - postalz and scrapblog.

Going Postalz

Now there's a new service called postalz that lets you create and send digital postcards using your own images instead. Signing up for an account is a quick process that involves entering your email address and picking out a username. You're given a URL of postalz.com/yourusername where all the postcards you create will be stored. After that, you can begin to create your first digital postcard.

The basic options allow you to customize the background, add a banner, and choose the handwriting by selecting one of the "handwriting" fonts. Clicking the "spice it up" button gives you the ability to customize the postcard further with your own photos imported from flickr or uploaded from your PC. You can also upload videos from YouTube, Guba, or Metacafe.

Other options let you insert text boxes or clipart, but be warned - the clipart looks like it's more appropriate for a MySpace profile, with images like bouncing hearts, swimming fish, and yes, even something that looks like a floating piece of blue cheese. (I know, I don't understand either). However, the clipart section called "callouts" has conversation and thought bubbles that could be placed above the photo subjects' heads and customized with clever sayings, thus saving the clipart section from being a total loss.

Of course, if you're into the MySpace thing, you can decorate your card to the point of distraction and embed the code on your MySpace, bebo, Facebook, orkut, friendster, hi5, tagged, piczo, Blogger, or xanga page.

Postcards are sent via email and postalz gives you easy access to your address books from Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook, or AOL to do so. People receiving the card can not only read the card, but can comment on it using "spots", which is a feature that lets them add an interactive response anywhere on the card. They can even edit the postcard itself, and compose a reply right on the card, as if responding to an email.

Although the postcards are fun to create and play around with, getting just the right look could take some time as the postcards tend to look somewhat juvenile without any real effort put into their creation. Therefore, people who always try to achieve perfection with their online creations may want to stick to faster methods for sharing their photos until they get home and have more time.

Online Scrapbooking

However, if I was looking for the best way to showcase my photos in a more artistic way, I think I would wait until vacation was over and come home to create a scrapblog page instead.

The scrapblog service lets you use your photos to create highly personalized online scrapbook albums. You can use one of the pre-defined themes, or you can start with a blank page and completely customize it with backgrounds, shapes, frames, text, and stickers, almost like a real scrapbook. YouTube videos can be added as well.

The customizations and add ins at scrapblog are, overall, of much higher quality of those at postalz, so the end results are more aesthetically appealing designs. At scrapblog, the focus is more on creating a lasting online album, not a quick postcard, so it's clear they spent time making sure the customization options were diverse and plentiful, not just a collection of goofy clipart.

scrapblog page featured in scrapblog blog

Scrapblog also has a future service planned where you will be able to keep or give your scrapblog albums as photo books or DVDs, something more that speaks to the permanence of what they want to offer.

Both services have potential, though, as they bring us digital methods for sharing photos in more creative ways than simply uploading them to an online galleries or making slideshows at RockYou. With digital cameras in the hands of almost every consumer now, I expect we will see even more services like these in the future.

This is a guest post by Nitin Karandikar, author of the Software Abstractions blog.

Recently I was looking at the log files for my blog, as I regularly do, and I was suddenly struck by the variety of search queries in Google from which users were being referred to my posts. I write often about the different varieties of search - including vertical search, parametric search, semantic search, and so on - so users with queries about search often land on my blog. But do they always find what they're looking for?

All the major search engines currently rely on the proximity of keywords and search terms to match results. But that approach can be misleading, causing the search engine to systematically produce incorrect results under certain conditions.

To demonstrate, let us take a look at three general use cases.

[Note: The examples given below are all drawn from Google. To be fair, all the major search engines use similar algorithms, and all suffer from similar problems. For its part, Google handles billions of queries every day, usually very competently. As the reigning market leader, though, Google is the obvious target - it goes with the territory!]

1. Difficulty in Finding Long Tail Results

Take Britney Spears. Given the current popularity of articles, news, pictures, and videos of the superstar singer, the results for practically any query with the word "spears" in it will be loaded with matches about her - especially if the search involves television or entertainment in any way.

Let's say you're watching the movie Zulu and you start wondering what material the large spears that all the extras are waving about are made of. So, you go to Google and type in "movie spears material" - this is an obviously insufficient description, as the screen shot below shows.

What happens if you expand on the query further - say: "what are movie spears made out of?" - does it help?

The general issue here is that articles about very popular subjects accumulate high levels of PageRank and then totally overwhelm long tail results. This makes it very difficult for a user to find information about unusual topics that happen to lie near these subjects (at least based on keywords).

2. Keyword Ordering

Since the major search engines focus only on the proximity of keywords without context, a user search that's similar to a popular concept gets swamped with those results, even if the order of keywords in the query has been reversed. For example, a tragic occurrence that's common in modern life is that of a bicycle getting hit by a car. Much less common is the possibility of a car getting hit by a bicycle, although it does happen. How would you search for the latter? Try typing "car hit by bicycle" into Google; here's a screen shot of what you get. [Note the third result, which is actually relevant to this search!]

3. Keyword Relationships

Since the major search engines focus only on the keywords in the search phrase, all sense of the relationship between the search terms is lost. For example, users commonly change the meaning of search terms by using negations and prepositions; it is also fairly common to look for the less common members of a set.

This takes us into the realm of natural language processing (NLP). Without NLP, the nuances of these query modifications are totally invisible to the search algorithms.

For example, a query such as "Famous science fiction writers other than Isaac Asimov" is doomed to failure. A screen shot of this search in Google is presented below. Most of the returned results are about Isaac Asimov, even when the user is explicitly trying to exclude him from the list of authors found.

All of the searches shown above look like gimmicks - queries designed intentionally to mislead Google's search algorithms. And in a sense, they are; these specific queries can be easily fixed by tweaking the search engine. Nevertheless, they do point to a real need: the value of understanding the meaning behind both the query and the content indexed.

Semantic Search

That's where the concept of semantic search comes in. I attended a media event earlier this year at stealth search startup Powerset (see: Powerset is Not a Google-killer!), at which they showcased a live demo of their search engine, currently in closed alpha, that highlighted solutions to exactly this type of issue.

For example, type "What was said about Jesus" into a major search engine, and you usually get a whole list of results that consist of the teachings of Jesus; this means that the search engine entirely missed the concepts of passive voice and "about." The Powerset results, on the other hand, were consistently on target (for the demo, anyway!).

In other words, when you look at just the keywords in the query, you don't really understand what the user is looking for; by looking at them within context, by taking into account the qualifiers, the prepositions, the negatives, and other such nuances, you can create a semantic graph of the query. The same case can be made for semantic parsing of the content indexed. Put the two together, as Powerset does, and you can get a much better feel for relevance of results.

What about Google? I'm sure the smart folks in Google's search-quality team are busily working on this problem as well. I look forward to the time when the major search engines handle long tail queries more accurately and make search a better experience for all of us.

Our digital lifestyle network blog last100 has a great round-up of the latest announcements at CES. Steve O'Hear is seeing a lot of products that bridge the gap between the PC and TV, or bring Internet content directly to a television. Highlights include the SlingCatcher (Sling Media), D-Link’s newly launched PC-on-TV Player, TiVo Desktop 2.6 (TiVo), and Internet-connected TVs from Sharp, Samsung and Panasonic.

last100: "the long-delayed SlingCatcher from Sling Media is being given its first public demo at CES. The device serves three purposes: getting content from a SlingBox (the company’s place-shifting device) onto a TV, playing back media stored on an attached USB hard drive on a TV, and viewing Internet content via a PC on a television. To achieve all of this, the SlingCatcher comes bundled with three applications. SlingPlayer for TV, SlingSync and SlingProjector."

Read about SlingCatcher and much more from CES at last100.

In October, Radiohead released their new album, In Rainbows, as an online download with a name-your-own pricing scheme -- you only paid if you wanted to, and only as much as you thought the album was worth. Our unscientific poll showed that a majority of ReadWriteWeb readers thought that downloadable albums were worth between $5-14 -- though we framed the question such that we can't make any determinations about how many people would actually be willing to pay that much.

And we really don't know how many people purchased In Rainbows online. comScore said just 38% of downloaders paid for the CD, most below $4, while Radiohead disputes those numbers -- but won't release any of their own. Writing in October, Richard MacManus predicted that it would be the physical CD that would be the true money maker for the band. It looks like he was right.

"According to our poll US$5-9 is the most popular price range that people are willing to pay for the digital download version. That pricing will be virtually all profit to Radiohead, so the download version will make some money for the band," he wrote. "However the eventual single CD release will reach a much wider audience, so the physical CD will end up being the pot of gold at the end of In Rainbows."

The latest UK album charts have In Rainbows sitting pretty at #1. Because the Internet download version is no longer available, it is clear that Radiohead's main goal for the gimmick was to promote the planned CD release of their album. It would appear they were successful in that regard, but appearances can be deceiving. To be fair, it is way too early to tell what effect the In Rainbows online promotion had on the band's CD sales, so what follows is purely hypothetical.

It was certainly not hard for Richard to predict that a CD release for Radiohead would be a "pot of gold." The band's last 4 albums have reached #1 in the UK, and none of the bands albums have thus far failed to go platinum there. Even in the US, where the band's popularity has cooled since the late 90s, a gold record is nearly guaranteed for Radiohead. So Internet promotion or no, a hot selling CD was in the cards for Thom Yorke and company.

What we don't know yet, is how In Rainbows CD sales will compare with the band's past albums. Could it be that by offering essentially a prerelease of the album online, the band cannibalized future CD sales? Did the eventual cancellation of the download promotion and release of a traditional CD alienate early-adopters and cause them not to want to buy the album? Or did instead the Internet release merely attract casual fans who would not likely have purchase the CD anyway? These are all interesting questions, but it is still to early to form any definitive conclusions from Radiohead's experiment.

The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.

The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history - what's being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data.

Google will be represented by Brad Fitzpatrick, the inventor of LiveJournal and one of the primary minds behind OpenID, the concept of the Social Graph and the Google-led OpenSocial platform. Facebook will be represented by Benjamin Ling, who today runs the Facebook platform. Ling defected from Google three months ago, where he ran Google Checkout, to join Facebook. Also joining the workgroup is Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, probably the catalyst for all of this after his company scraped Robert Scoble's Facebook account and set off a huge debate about Data Portability and privacy.

If these industry titans can put aside their rivalry and work together - magic could happen. Hopefully they can work appropriately with the other members of the working group, bleeding edge consultants and representatives of smaller and in many cases more user-centric companies. If so, perhaps we can move appropriately into a future of powerful personalization and logically augmented activity online - while avoiding Minority Report-style dystopian scenarios.

Innovation on the internet is in its early, early days. The participation of representatives from Google and Facebook in this initiative could prove key in the continued development of what's possible, instead of the early suffocation of what could have been.

May the participants work nicely together to create the magic that we're waiting for.

Ah, what a difference a caucus makes. In November, when ABC and Facebook announced their partnership for US political coverage we, like many other tech pundits, expressed skepticism. We noted that polls on the Facebook politics section were drawing just around 1,000 participants -- "a microscopic number" compared to the 17 million US members of voting age on the site (now over 18 million). But just over a month later, things seem to have turned around completely.

While watching the joint ABC-Facebook debate last Saturday, I couldn't help but think that Facebook was getting the short end of the stick. The on screen graphics didn't include the Facebook name (just ABC's), the stage wasn't plastered with the Facebook logo (just one tiny graphic that was visible in occasional wide shots), there was no real content tie-in as there was for the CNN/YouTube debates or the MySpace/MTV Candidate Dialogues, and I don't think I once heard Charlie Gibson mention Facebook.

On the web, Facebook's debate promo site wasn't very impressive. There was a live comment wall, but with 30,000 comments logged over the course of the night and no context, it felt like trying to watch every Twitter stream on the web at once. In short: it was overwhelming and a bit dizzying.

But even so, things have really picked up on Facebook's political page. ABC is reporting that 1 million users have added their US politics application. It is unclear whether this number is post debate or overall (I'm thinking likely, overall) and because it is an officially sponsored application, Facebook doesn't offer usage metrics for it. But, regardless, the politics section of the site has clearly picked up steam since November. Most polls are now receiving around 10,000 votes and as Obama showed in Iowa, at least on the Democratic side, it might be possible to take some of that Internet support and make it count in the elections. According to a scientific ABC/Facebook poll, 40% of respondents get political information on the Internet, and 2/3rds of those say that information is important in deciding who to vote for.

Why the turn around? Barack Obama might be the reason. Obama has long been the most popular candidate on Facebook. He now has over 210,000 supporters on the site -- up 4,000 since just last night -- and commands 61% of the Democratic attention. His popularity on the site grew almost 20% following his pivotal win in Iowa last week. As we noted after the Iowa caucuses, much of Obama's support in the state came from young voters (under the age of 29), and not surprisingly the majority of US Facebook users are also under the age of 29 (according to their ad targeting tool).

These numbers paint an incredibly rosy picture for Barack Obama, Ron Paul (who has a commanding lead among Facebook Republicans) and Mike Huckabee (who has surged from 8.74% support in November to 18.75% today). Of course, the Republicans will need to get more young voters to the polls than they did in Iowa (where 80% of young voters caucused with the Democrats) in order for Paul to benefit from his online support. (Huckabee, perhaps, has less invested in the youth vote because he also does well in national polls and among evangelical Christian voters.)

Microsoft announced a $1.2 billion takeover offer for Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer. FAST's board of directors unanimously recommended that shareholders approve the deal, and 37% of the shareholders -- including the company's two largest institutional investors -- have already irrevocably accepted the offer.

FAST has over 3500 enterprise clients, including heavyweights like Disney, The Washington Post, AutoTrader.com, and LexisNexis. According to Mary-Jo Foley, we should pay attention to how Microsoft will integrate FAST into their SharePoint Server. "Remember what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said about SharePoint last year: He characterized SharePoint as the next big operating system from Microsoft," she writes. "More and more, it’s looking like enterprise search functionality is one of the biggest reasons why."

In a press release, Microsoft points out that the acquisition would also give the company increased presence in the European market, in addition to enhancing the enterprise search products.

Larry Dignan thinks this will lead the rest of the industry to consolidate the same way the advertising industry has been. "Until now organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs," said Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s Business Division. Sounds like Dignan might be right.

It begins with billboards spotted in exotic places like Knoxville, Tennessee and Ames, Iowa and posted online by curious Lost fans. The billboards advertise a URL, "FlyOceanicAir.com." Upon visiting the website, you are sucked into an adventure involving multiple websites, video diaries, photos with text hidden among the pixels, clue hunts, and strategy games. You can even call a toll-free phone number and get progress updates about the search for missing Oceanic Flight 815. Interesting characters and mysteries keep web players engaged and new content is posted at seemingly random intervals, forcing frequent check-ins to see if there's anything new.

So begins Lost's second Alternate Reality Game, a follow up to this summer's "The Lost Experience" game, which spun clues deep into websites - like those belonging to advertising partners Sprite, Jeep, Monster.com, and Verizon.

The new game, dubbed "Find815" in reference to the game's main website, began January 1st to promote the new season of Lost.

Crafty fans soon discovered that one of the game's websites was registered to a group called Hoodlum, based in Brisbane, Australia. (Oh, and Hoodlum's CEO is Tracey Robertson and an in-game email to the main character, Sam, happens to be from a "Tracey R.," conspiring fans point out.)

Having been in the business for nearly a decade, Hoodlum is a company that was ahead of the curve when it came to multi-platform entertainment than spans beyond TV to mobile phones, the web, and even "real" life.

Hoodlum's website showcases some of their work and their press releases highlight how they created, developed, and produced their multi-platform, interactive media creations. Among the solutions for their clients, Hoodlum mentions that they offer "a unique tool to track and measure the engagement of users." There are no details on what that tool may be, but we can only guess that it's something a bit more advanced than a tracking cookie.

Hoodlum's core technology is called INCA (Interactive Net-based Channel Administration), a proprietary system which gives them the ability to produce projects on time and within budget while tying together content administration, platform integration, and final delivery. Within INCA, there are modules like user management, content management, approvals, game engine, characters, and scripts - all of which combine to run the game.

Selling themselves as a one-stop shop for these types of projects, Hoodlum offers solutions for all areas of a project, from conception to strategy to creative to production and delivery. Founded in 1999, Hoodlum's founders claim to be "evangelists for interactive TV," something the U.S. wants, "but doesn't quite understand," they say.

Well, we may have to learn.

The new, "New Media"

In the U.S., the TV writers strike continues with no end in sight, leaving the door open for companies specializing in other types of entertainment to grab a foothold in the big business of American entertainment. The release of Halo3 proved there is more than enough room for alternative entertainment mediums beyond scripted television to make profits.

When all that's left of TV is poor-quality reality shows and other mindless filler, more sophisticated viewers will turn their attention away from the tube, likely going online instead in search of more stimulating entertainment. Companies like Hoodlum, whose business model is producing this new type of "blended" entertainment, will be poised to become the next big media giants - while the major networks continue to squabble over paying writers for webisodes.

In fact, Hollywood rag "Variety" reported earlier in 2007 of former Fox Interactive Media president, Ross Levinsohn, warning attendees at an industry event that "a strike would 'open the window a little more' for Internet creators to steal away audience from traditional media." But NBC Entertainment/Universal Media Studios co-chairman Marc Graboff wasn't concerned about online video cutting into TV series viewing. "There are so many cats flushing a toilet that you can watch," he quipped.

Marc clearly hasn't been paying attention to what ABC is up to.

In May of last year, Sonic Mountain bought the assets of Evan William's podcast directory Odeo (and then promptly renamed itself Odeo). In September, the new company bought out its chief rival, FireAnt, for about $400,000. The company planned to launch in December a public beta of its new software that merged Odeo's podcasting tools with FireAnt's desktop media player (which aggregated video blog feeds). Odeo obviously missed that date, but company COO Eric Rupert says that he expects the new Odeo "to be released for a more 'open' beta sometime at the beginning of Feb."

Rupert spoke to the Voice Over Times blog and indicated that the new Odeo will also include an embedded browser and will help people find, play, and store media content (audio and video podcasts).

"It’s a client for subscribing to, watching and listening to podcasts which can also transcode the content and sync it with a number of portable devices including smartphones," Rupert told Voice Over Times. The ability to sync with a wide range of portable devices was always one of FireAnt's most attractive features. Judging by the screenshot (above), the new Odeo media browser is based directly on the FireAnt software. While it is hard to tell from just a screenshot, to my eyes it looks nearly identical to the last iteration of FireAnt.

The relaunch positions Odeo to compete with companies like Veoh and their VeohTV service and Mefeedia. FireAnt's player has always been very slick, and Odeo still has name recognition as one of the first podcast authorities, so combining the two in the way Odeo plans makes sense. Can Odeo make a comeback? We'll begin to find out next month.

We have a new author on the ReadWriteWeb team, Sarah Perez, who will become a daily writer in a few weeks time - once she finishes up at her current job. Sarah has started posting here already, so keep an eye out out for her posts.

Sarah is from sunny Tampa, Florida where she had worked as an I.T. Professional for many years. You may know Sarah already from her personal site sarahintampa.com, which launched in 2004 and was the reason I noticed her writing.

Welcome to Sarah, who joins myself, Josh, Marshall and Alex as regular contributers to RWW.