MySpace will serve as a ‘virtual audition city’ and conduct auditions online

The popular social networking site MySpace has long been known as a home for budding and established musicians as well as many other performers. All of them who use the networking site as a means of reaching out to fans, have something more to look forward to. Now they are going to reach a totally different audience, the judges of ‘America’s Got Talent’.

MySpace, NBC and FremantleMedia are getting ready to go ahead with a partnership, which will treat the popular social network as a ‘virtual audition city’ for the upcoming season of the summer reality show.

The producers of the show have already held auditions in Orlando, Fla, Nashville and other cities. Now they are all set to conduct auditions online as well. One episode of this variety show will be dedicated to the submissions of users of MySpace.com.

People are uploading music videos, stunts and tricks to MySpace all the time.

According to MySpace’s vice president for marketing & content development, Josh Brooks. The partnership will now tap into the talent, which exists online for NBC, added the network’s director of digital promotion strategies, Jared Goldsmith.

Warner Brothers to bring back WB brand as a video Web site

The WB brand, conceived as a broadcast network more than a decade ago - in 1995 – subsequently closed in 2006, is returning as a video Web site that will combine classic shows with short original series, the Warner Brothers TV group has announced.

TheWB.com and a complementary web site for children KidsWB.com, both are part of a ‘digital destination’ strategy adopted by Warner Brothers, which is a subsidiary of Time Warner. The idea is to tailor sites to specific audiences. In an effort to compete for consumers’ attention and time, Warner and other media firms are seeking new outlets for content, often creating broadband Internet channels and bypassing the traditional network structure.

The president of the Warner television group, Bruce Rosenblum, stated, underlining his point:

My 20-year-old daughter and her friends watch ‘Pushing Daisies’ and ‘One Tree Hill’ but not on television.

They are watching on laptops and mobile handsets. Here is the interesting part - to them, that is television.

The site, to begin in a test form next month, is to focus on the audiences on the age group of 16 to 34, particularly women.

New image recognition software methods to facilitate online image searching

Google has just revealed details of its new image recognition software methods that will be utilised for facilitating online image searching. Google scientists and researchers, speaking at the International World Wide Web Conference in China, described VisualRank - an algorithm for combining methods for ranking images which look similar, with image recognition techniques.

According to the Google experts, image analysis still remains a largely unsolved area in the domain of computer science. As looking at all indexed images would be rather impractical, they have reportedly focused more on a subset of the images catalogued in order to analyse and compare the digital images. However, the Google team members claimed their image Search to be the ‘most comprehensive image search’ available on the web.

A team of around 150 employees has been working to create a scoring system for the relevance of images that are related to these products. Google has opted to concentrate on the most popular and prolific product queries on its product search, comprising terms, such as Zune, iPod and Xbox.

Commenting on the exercise, a senior staff researcher at the search engine giant, mentioned.

We wished to incorporate all of the stuff, which is happening in computer vision and place it in a web framework.

Industry leaders push for home media networks

Chip and electronics makers Intel, Infineon, Texas Instruments and Panasonic have formed an alliance for promoting home networks for movies, pictures and music using domestic wiring. The four top chip and electronics makers will also help market and test a standard for wiring together computers, entertainment systems and TVs through electricity, phone and coaxial cable lines, which already exist in most homes.

The chip and electronics makers hope that the first products utilising the new standard will hit the market in about a year’s time. Consumer electronics and computer manufacturers have long talked of the digital home concept, in which entertainment appliances and computers are linked and then typically controlled from the computer, making it easier to share digital media content between various devices. However, a lack of common standards between makers of these devices has hampered progress.

There already exists a common wireless standard for linking home devices using Wi-Fi. Wired networks do have the advantage of being more stable as well as having more capacity, plus the building blocks for the infrastructure already exist in a majority of homes.

Intel’s Matt Theall, president of the new HomeGrid Forum, stated:

Powerline is the world’s most ubiquitous technology. There is a huge market potentially for this kind of technology, since it can be embedded in TVs, PCs, DVD players, and speakers - any home entertainment device.

Google PageRank filter added on SponsoredReviews

SponsoredReviews has just recently added Google PageRank to their filtering in order to help advertisers prioritise blogs via Google PageRank.

It is not an indicator of how well a site ranks, though. It is simply ‘Toolbar Google PageRank’, and it cannot be used to deduce the correct measurement of the value of a link, though it can be used as one of the many metrics for judging quality. SponsoredReviews brought in the filtering so that they can filter bids from bloggers who want to write about the advertisers’ site or businesses.

SponsoredReview mentioned in a note:

As some of you have already noticed, we have been busy adding new metrics and filters. We have just added the ability to filter bids by Pagerank. Over the past few weeks we have also added traffic data from Compete.com. We are looking forward to providing more information and filtering soon.

Our next major upgrade is going to be on the “find bloggers” page. We will be adding all of the same great filtering you get in the “Incoming bids” screen. This will allow you to find all those super high quality posts from bloggers that never bid on opportunities directly.