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Feed Chronicle = Customizable Drudge Report

For novice Internet users, Google Reader, RSS feeds and other media tools may seem too foreign to tinker with. Feed Chronicle, "the collaborative newspaper" does all the work for you and arranges your story in a friendly, familiar format.

On Feed Chronicle news sources are determined by the user. The front page is displayed in a three column layout, with tabs for various news topics: World, US, Business, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, Science and Offbeat.

A simple homepage might seem like a suicide design plan for a news site, but plenty of Americans still prefer a simple and straightforward layout, such as Drudge Report. Drudge's dull design has been criticized for years, but the site attracts millions of readers each day and up to 7 billion each year.

Essentially, the publishers of Feed Chronicle devised a personal version of Drudge Report and gave more control to the reader. A customizable layout scheme allows each member to choose five different sources for each news segment of their online "paper".For a lighthearted, satirical source, you can choose the Onion. Other news sources include:

I was pleased by the two-step registration process, and within 10 minutes, I completed my custom "newspaper."

Here's my list of pros and cons for the beta version of Feed Chronicle.
Pros:

Customizable news layout.
Easy interface- which caters to its target market.
Multiple news categories.

Cons:

Lack of sources for certain sections, including sports and science.

There's still room for improvement, but I think the minds at launched Feed Chronicle may have found an ideal site for news junkies.

Trueblood: Internet Marketing Story of the Year

vote vote results

Our readers have spoken, and they declared Marketingshift's top story of 2008: HBO's extreme marketing of Trueblood.

Jason Dowdell wrote the first Trueblood plost after he received an unusual package containing a vial full of red liquid along with a small card with Japanese writing on it and a URL. Eventually, Jason realized it was HBO's creative media pack to promote the new series, Trueblood.

Before we knew it, readers were hooked on the HBO hit series about modern vampires. Four months after the post, we still receive comments on a daily basis, which is why it comes as no surprise that Trueblood received 41% of the total votes out of 10 stories. It was followed by Amazon's holiday sales record, which received 25% of the vote. In third place, there was a tie between the boycottalabamanow.com controversy and our post about slower traffic for eBay and Best Buy during holiday sales. They each received 16.7% of the vote.

We're glad you voted and enjoyed the crazy ride known as 2008 with us. We can't wait to see the amazing developments in 2009.

Macbook Wheel Video Creates Buzz

I've always been amused by the buzz following any story regarding Steve Jobs or any product from Apple.

Harsh critics and die-hard fans of Apple never fail to provide humorous amounts of sensational comments. That's why I love this video from the Onion, on the new Macbook. "Wheel."

The keyboard is replaced by a giant version of the touch-sensitive wheel featured on iPods, and Mac enthusiasts rave about the "simplicity" of Apple's latest product. During a mock interview, Brian Gilman, a fictional "Senior Product Innovator" for Apple said:

At Apple our philosophy is create products that are simple to use, and nothing is more simple than a single giant button..Everything is just a few-hundred clicks away. We like to think we're giving customers features that they don't even realize they want yet.

My favorite "feature" on the Macbook Wheel was the "Predictive Sentence Technology" which completes the sentence for you. As an iPhone user, I've learned just how often auto-complete feature is more of an inconvenience than a perk. (Yet I can't convince myself to deactivate it.)

A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing the Web according to a set of policies.