NowPublic has released a new feature called Scan that aggregates and geo-locates information from a wide variety of resources including unconvential ones such as micro-blogging services like twitter, Identi.ca and Pownce and presents the data to the public in a useful manner. Unlike current methods for tracking information which is limited to a single keyword of hashtag, NowPublic's Scan tool can handle many different keywords to monitor. Scan Sample: BlogWorld 2008 We'll use the current BlogWorld Scan2008 event in Las Vegas as an example of what NowPublic scan can do with all of this data. Now every channel will have Scan functionality so users can do the following: · See which NowPublic members are near a given story location · Track who is micro-blogging about a topic, where they are located and what they are saying; · See when the most activity on the topic occurred; · View the most popular links within a given topic; · View recommended microblogged posts; · Flag content as being high quality and pertinent via social search. Notice all of the keywords that Scan is using to track all of the news related to those keywords, in this case the BlogWorld 2008 convention in Las Vegas. In other monitoring services you can only enter one word where as NowPublic's Scan tool can handle many different keywords. Live and On Location NowPublic's Scan tools enables users to be feel as if they're live and on the scene thanks to all of the updates and information coming from people actually at those locations. In this sample, here's what people interested in BlogWorld 2008 had to say. Your Own CNN News Center The Scan tool allows you to create your own type of CNN center where by you can start aggregating all of your news resources into a centralized manner. No more surfing to countless sites to capture the news thanks to NowPublic. The layouts of the channels have also been changed. Conclusion The ability to track and monitor multiple keywords and spellings is an excellent new tool. The traditional ways have fallen by the wayside so this new technology is a much needed contribution to our online search mechanisms. The limitations of single keyword identifiers like those on hashtags will now be a thing of the past thanks to the Scan tool from NowPublic. Here's the Podcast of our very own Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins interviewing Michael Tippett, CMO of NowPublic.

Having children enter the public school system this last year has really opened my eyes up to a number of things that only parents can identify with. Not only is my son becoming something resembling a person (as opposed to a chubby mass of toddler cuteness), he's exposed to teachings outside the normal curriculum of information I'd normally expose him to (for instance, unlike the local public school system, I probably wouldn't have spent a week of lessons centering around the ins and outs of recycling).

It's not to the point where I feel like I need to intervene and start suggesting alternative topics for my son's teachers, but it is making me aware the need to be in touch with what it is the teachers do with our children during the days, and the importance of having a hand in helping your child get the best education possible.

That's why it was refreshing to sit down with Edward Fields recently on Mashable Conversations and talk with him about what he's doing as CEO of HotChalk.  They're a niche social network for students, teachers and parents that uses the power of quality user-generated-content to improve the education experience for all involved. It's a place for teachers to share in lesson plans that cater to students at all levels of development, parents to stay in touch with what the kids are learning, and kids to better understand and relate the the curriculum they're being taught.

This is one of the most apt and useful applications of the niche social network concept I've come across. If you have a school-aged child or are a teacher, this is a must-see site.

Listen to the MP3 to hear more from CEO Edward Fields and I as we discuss American education and how HotChalk aims to help our children succeed in learning.

Sean and I had the rare opportunity of unmasking a company today on Mashable Conversations. Our guest on the show today was Jon Labes, the founder of a new video marketplace called Plentitube (pronounced like "plentitude, if you change the 'd' to a 'b'). Jon is probably best known as being the creative mind behind Wallstrip, the financial podcast that was later famously sold to CBS Interactive for a tidy sum.

Through his experience in New Media production as well as the experience of taking a show like that from concept to completion to exit, he was made aware of the wide variety of issues that arise for successful independent video producers that we're just not equipped to deal with.  Legal issues abound, as do business decisions, odd technical issues, and sales situations; most of the time indie producers just want to, well, produce.

Plentitube is a marketplace built with that in mind.  It's currently still in an invite only beta situation, but their goal is to take top notch producers and pair them with advertisers, resources and potential investors and owners for the content.  In our interview, we explore the history that led Jon to this venture, as well as the intracies of the marketplace, and how it can benefit the New Media video producer set.

Discussion: YouTube v. Viacom, the $1 Billion Dollar Privacy Question
In our discussion segment, we talk a bit about the YouTube v. Viacom debacle, and what it means (from legal laymen) to open the Pandora's box on user records, and why we're glad it's Google getting sued.  Leave your comments below for inclusion in future shows.

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First of all, if you're American, and you're reading this - I have to ask why? The web is like a ghost town today. There isn't much going on via Twitter. FriendFeed is unusually slow, and about six or so of our two trillion readers showed up to leave a comment today. It's July 4! Independence Day! Go out and have a brew and a hot dog! For all our non-American friends and readers, and the six US readers who have nothing else better to do, Sean P. Aune and I have recorded a special episode of Mashable Conversations today. We scoured the web and couldn't find a guest to come in today, so we reverted to a topic that had particularly irked us from the week past - the bizzarre assumption by some in the blogosphere that Identi.ca is the natural successor to Twitter. I won't steal the show's thunder, but Sean and I puzzle over this idea and try to figure out exactly why this is being said. It's a short episode, so go ahead and watch before you throw on your swimwear and jump in the pool this afternoon.

With the proliferation of information sources and ways to read them, it seems counter-intuitive that one of the hotter topics in the blogosphere is still aggregation, discovery and syndication. Yet here we are, yet another day, yet another Twitter story, yet another FriendFeed story, and yet another Digg story.

Don't get me wrong - I too have a obsessive fascination with the nuanced myriad of way we can move our 1's and 0's around. That's why when I got a ping from Ari Newman, founder and president of company making an AI-powered news filtration service, my ears perked up.

I had a chance to bring him on the Mashable Conversations podcast so I could learn a bit about it. It's that's suitable for news junkies and professional bloggers like myself, but it's primarily targeted to marketing and public relations professionals, as it has a wide variety of graphing and search functions that serve to aggregate keyword searched news from just about every source out there.

It is capable of pulling in any RSS source, any Google alert, and is able to search across a wide variety of sources, from New Media and Old. 

What seems to be clincher on this is the review system, which attempts to learn with at "three dimensional rating system" exactly the style of news you're interested in.  After you're done setting up your complex filtering requirements, you can begin to subtly refine the filters to find the topics you're tracking by rating the source types.  For instance, if you're more interested in finding out user comments, you can place an emphasis on feeds coming out of FriendFeed or Twitter.  If you're focused on New Media response, or a specific response, you can highly rate certain blogs or a certain genre of blogs, and the system will pick up on those relationships.

It sounds like a very advanced system, and it only launched this Monday, so I haven't begun to explore the whole depth of it yet, but what I've been played with so far has kept me intrigued.

Is there anything more frustrating than working on your homework late at night, you get stuck on a problem and there is no one you can get a hold of for assistance? This is where Cramster, a site to help you with your homework, comes into play. If your homework is in the fields such as math, science, engineering and so on, this is the perfect site for when you get stuck in those late night cram sessions. You go on the site, pose your question, and instead of just getting an answer, users are encouraged to explain the steps they took to arrive at their answer so that you can actually learn from them. Some of the problems I took a peek at, even with explanations, made me scratch my head, but the people who needed the answers seemed thrilled. The company currently enjoys being the top educational app on Facebook in addition to their popular website, and as time goes on, they will be adding more of their functionality into the app to make it even more usable. As for the future plans for the original site, you can expect to see the addition of more professors answering questions, and a whole slew of new practice questions both licensed from text book publishers, as well as created by users. I had the chance to speak with both Robert Angarita and Aaron Hawkey about the site, and the future plans for it.

Lots of people have been letting others know on Twitter what they're listening to as they work through their day, but what if you could also include the actual MP3 for people to join in and listen along?

This is the idea behind Blip, a new service from Fuzz. that allows you to microblog ala Twitter, but with the added feature of using an MP3 search to embed the song you are currently listening to into the post so that others can check it out. Unlike SeeqPod, which has run afoul of legal questions, Blip is "Obviously it is legal and it's covered by the DMCA," according to Fuzz CEO, Jeff Yasuda.

One of the most amazing things about Blip is they have done something that everyone has cried out for Twitter to do: a self-refreshing feed page! What a novel concept!  It's true, the page updates itself without hitting refresh... it's obviously demonic magic.

We sat down with Gavin Hayes, lead singer of Dredg, to get his thoughts on what Blip brings to the music industry, as well as what he, as a musician, would like to see change in the dynamics of the industry. I have to say I was quite intrigued by his thoughts on pre-sales of albums, and how that might be a way to bring the artist and fans closer together.

What do you do if you have a chunk of time slotted to hang out and talk with the creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic? You do what everyone else does in the Web 2.0 world - you talk about Twitter!

This Friday past, Matt took some time out to hang out on Mashable Conversations to chat with me and you guys, not because he had anything to pitch me, but because he's a genuinely nice guy who when he says offhandedly at a WordCamp that he wouldn't mind coming on your podcast at some point, gladly obliges.

Given that we had no particular agenda of topics to talk about, we chatted briefly about what's in store for the next version of WordPress (here's a hint - WordPress is going to be tackling video in their next version, and from the sounds of it will be an ambitious undertaking), and then I went down the laundry list of hot topics in the blogosphere at the moment.

I didn't bring up Twitter just for the sake of talking about it - a while back, Matt announced the release of a special theme for WordPress called Prolouge, which we covered here at Mashable. The idea behind the release was to provide small to mid-sized teams a way to have Twitter functionality without putting the company business out there for the world to see.  It's a great idea that they not only gave to the world, but use themselves internally at Automattic.

In the release blog, though, Matt had made an interesting statement about the theme:

Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to.

I tried to pin down with him what he thought the feasibility of this plan was, and the likelyhood of it coming about given the chronic downtime Twitter has been experiencing lately.

The biggest problem that Twitter has experienced, with regard to it being down all the time, is generally regarded as it's scalability problem.  This is an area that Matt could speak to with some authority, as WordPress has climbed the various Mt. Everests in terms of high usage situations, and generally weathered all the adventure without a hitch.

Aside from the Twitter topic, we also talked about the future of blog content, RSS, comment fragmentation, and how much he loves his Kindle (in which I took the opportunity to shamelessly appeal to Jeff Bezos, Mashable Conversations Listener, to send me a review unit).

It's definitely a riveting conversation top to bottom. Whether you're a WordPress user or just a user of the Web, the conversation is definitely interesting.

Twitter is down. I say that and it sounds like I'm playing word association games (I say Twitter, you say... down, that's right). It's unfortunate, given the inordinate amount of time people like us spend on the service that it's become so downright unavailable recently. There has been much more communication from the Twitterpeople with regards to what parts are up and down, and we're definitely glad that they're doing something about fixing it. On the other hand, contrary to the best predictions of Robert Scoble this on our weekend podcast, people just aren't happy to know why the service is down - they want it back up. A Tale of Romance Gone Awry Frederic Lardinois, regular panelist on the Elite Tech News podcast as well as blogger at LastPodcast, has filed for divorce today. Divorce from Twitter, that is. While the official reasons behind the breakup are listed as irreconcilable differences, he's told the readers of his blog a much more personalized account, citing that Twitter has made herself unavailable to him, there's been (*ahem*) performance issues, and at one point Twitter even locked out Frederic completely from accessing her with his Snitter:

It’s great that the folks at Twitter are starting to communicate with us, but I find it harder and harder to get myself to use Twitter anymore.

As it seems to be the case more and more these days, the truth comes out as Frederic admits he's had a thing for FriendFeed for quite some time, and finds that talking with FriendFeed is often more interesting that the same old same old with Twitter. Will I Stick Around? I'm not sure. I think that I've been using Twitter less and less myself prior to the outages, but for me my Twitter usage is pretty cyclical. I'll start using it heavily, then I'll get preoccupied with FriendFeed, or sometimes I'll just stop using both altogether and actually get some work done. Luckily, I haven't really felt the effects of the screwball outages this time around, because it happened mostly during a cycle of non-use for me. I'm starting to see my Twitter usage diminish to mostly passive. I check my @ replies a couple times a day, and I'm starting to add more automated methods of posting (such as the recent addition of my XboX status messages to the service). Most of my Twitter interaction happens these days on FriendFeed (but for the occasional political blowout - I'd link an example, but guess what? That archive feature is horked.). Most likely for me, I'll maintain an active presence on it and occasionally actively pop in from time to time. As for an actual heavy communications tool for me, I think those days may be behind me as well.

In 2006, rap artist Chamillionaire’s track “Ridin” became iconic in American pop culture, being infamously parodied by Weird Al Yankovic ("White and Nerdy"), becoming the most downloaded ringtone of all-time, and ultimately winning a Grammy for Best Rap Song. However, none of that was coincidence or pure luck.

At the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles, Pete got an opportunity to talk with the artist about how he uses social media to better connect with his fans and ultimately sell more music. Chamillionaire also talks about how the music industry needs new metrics to determine what’s popular, since album sales are meaningless in the world of a la carte purchases via iTunes.

It’s a must listen for anyone in the music industry and social media marketers that aspire to work with top artists.