Evri is a site currently in beta that uses news sources on the web to chart the popularity of different subjects in the categories of People, Places and Things. Clicking on the individual circles in the flow chart opens up a list of news articles in which they appear. Using Evri.com is certainly one way to keep up to date on whats hot and what's not.

Because it's an AIR app, Snackr is cross-platform and sports a look that won't feel out of place on your OS. Ticker speed and position on screen are adjustable, and you can force the ticker on top of your other windows if it suits you. Snackr supports OPML files, so it's very easy to populate with the feeds of your choice. It also minimizes to a tiny tab when you want to put it away for a while, and shows a preview of each story you click on, instead of going directly to your browser. Snackr doesn't interrupt what you're doing unless you want it to.

All in all, this is one of the most useful, best-designed AIR apps we've seen yet. It's essential for heavy RSS users, or anyone who wants to stay on top of breaking news. Don't ditch your full-featured feed reader, by any means, but do supplement it with Snackr if you're looking for a faster, more dynamic way to consume information.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

EDIT: The URL for the first link is fixed. It's Snackr.net, not .com. Thanks Ian, Jake and David!

Condé Nast Publications (which owns Wired, Wired.com, and a whole bunch of major magazines) has agreed to purchase Ars Technica for an undisclosed sum.

According to TechCrunch, Ars will be placed under the Wired Digital umbrella under CondéNet, which was made whole with the 2006 acquisition of Wired.com, and may be combined with Wired and Wired.com. The sale will be announced some time in the next week, Mashable has confirmed.

Ars looks to be a good fit for Wired and Wired.com, especially given the similar styles of tech reporting available on on both networks. Both include traditional professional feature style reporting on technology and trends. Wired will benefit from the addition of the new writing staff and Ars will gain a new outlet from its reporting. We wouldn't be surprised to see their work appearing in other publications across the Condé Nast house. The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and even GQ (all Condé Nast publications) could stand to benefit from Gear and Gadgets and some of the other ongoing reporting from Ars Technica.

Twitter may have started off as a micro-blogging tool that asked users "what are you doing" right now? But the service has grown into a complex communications platform. Some people use Twitter to keep in touch with a few friends, while others use it take part in wider discussions taking place throughout the blogosphere. Still others use it as a sort of micro-broadcast medium, sending out updates, but rarely responding to messages posted by others. One thing is clear though: People post a lot of links to interesting articles on Twitter.

TweetWire attempts to take some of the most interesting links and organize them in a newspaper style web page. Tweets are broken up into a handful of categories, including elections, technology, sports, and celebrities. And the links are collected using a combination of the Twitter search engine TweetScan and the Yahoo! Pipes RSS remixing utility.

The results are... mixed. On the one hand, we love the idea of finding some of the best links from Twitter laid out on a simple web page. This way you don't have to sift through page after page of messages from your contacts to find out what people are talking about. But TweetWire isn't going to replace your daily newspaper anytime soon. On the one hand, all the links were at least interesting enough for someone to post them online. On the other hand, a lot of the day's top stories might never make it to TweetWire simply because nobody bothered to tweet about them.

If you're only interested in tech news, you might want to check out TwitLinks, which compiles tweets from a handful of influential technology bloggers.

[via Killer Startups]

If you run a blog or other web site, odds are you already know how important social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon can be for generating traffic. But while you may be used to seeing large traffic spikes from these sources occasionally, over time social bokmarking sites can give you yet another gauge of your blog's popularity. Have your stories been Dugg or stumbled more times than your competitors? SocialScan makes it easy to find out.

Just enter any URL into SocialScan and the service will look up the site on 12 different social bookmarking/news sites. Some measures are more thorough than others. For example, you'll only find out how many times that exact URL (ie: your homepage) has been submitted to sites like StumbleUpon or Reddit, while the Digg results will show any time a web page starting with your URL has been submitted.

[via MakeUseOf]

Just when you thought -- "I wonder what Google could possibly develop next?" -- the company busts out a new layer for Google Earth which gives users the ability to browse the day's New York Times headlines by region.

In all honesty, the feature is a great idea, and we're sure the company has some work to do (hopefully adding support for other news outlets), but it comes off as "half-assed" for now with New York (what a surprise!) getting the most NY Times markers. California, Mexico, Michigan, and a few other places get a marker too, and as you can see in the picture, the NY Times provides Google with the most important of news stories. Oh well, it'll probably get a lot better.

Other Google Earth improvements in version 4.2 include a simpler GUI, high-res photos of terrain, the ability to explore stars and constellations, and more.

[via Techmeme]

After ruling that Microsoft has failed to comply with a 2004 antitrust order, the European Union has added $1.3 billion to the fines already owed by Microsoft. That brings the total to about $2.5 billion, or just slightly more than pocket change to Bill Gates.

A few years back, EU regulators had decided that Microsoft was abusing its position as the number one operating system provider by bundling software with Windows that would decrease competition. Wednesday the EU ruled that Microsoft hasn't done enough to remedy the situation

Microsoft released a statement pointing out that in October of 2007, the EU found that the company was "in full compliance with the 2004 decision," meaning that the fine relates to past misdeeds. This could explain why Microsoft made such a big show of launching an open standards initiative last week.

NewsClipper is a news aggregation service that brings together videos from popular news sites like CNN, the BBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, and ESPN. You can sort videos by network, category, most recent, or most viewed. Future upgrades will include a search box and the ability to rate the videos you watch.

You can also add videos to a playlist and create your own virtual news channel with videos from various sources. Overall, it's an extraordinarily useful little site. But if it catches on, something tells us some of the TV networks providing its source material aren't going to be too happy. That's because CNN, for example doesn't offer users the ability to embed videos on their own sites. It's not clear how NewsClipper funnels the video stream, but you can grab embed code from any video on NewsClipper and add the video to your own site.

On the one hand, most videos feature plenty of branding so you always know where the video came from. So you could view each short clip as a commercial for a TV network. On the other hand, if you viewed the video on its original page, you'd actually be viewing other ads as well, which you don't see if you stream a video from NewsClipper. And that means that we expect the site to start getting cease and desist letters any day now. But we kind of hope it happens later, rather than sooner. In a perfect world, the TV news networks would partner with a site like NewsClipper and share any advertising revenue.

[via TechCrunch]

Ever wonder what you would get if you crossed Digg with Techmeme and gave the new site a slick Web 2.0 style theme? Yeah, neither did we, but that's a half decent description of Newspond, a news aggregation site that launched today.

Newspond is not a social news site like Digg. Articles aren't submitted by users. Newspond is more like Techmeme in that the site gathers stories from across the web using an automated system to analyze the topics that blogs and news sites are talking about. Articles show up on the front page or in a variety of subsections like tech, games, and science. Under each main article is a list of links to more articles on the same topic from other web sites. You'll have to click the "View All Sources" tab to see additional articles, but Newspond will pull them up without a page refresh.

While there's no user generated primary content on the site, Newspond does have a nifty commenting system which adds a social aspect to the site. The comments are threaded and easy to read. But you really have to play with them to get the full effect.

[via Mashable]

We're big fans of RSS readers -- of either the stand alone or web based variety -- but it if you want to scan a lot of headlines from a lot of different sites, a feed reader is not always the fastest (or most convenient, if you are on a public computer) way to access that information.

This is where Alltop.com comes in. Alltop.com is a new site that displays RSS headlines from a variety of different sites, sorted by category, all on one page. Hover your mouse pointer over a headline to read a description/excerpt. It's very, very slick.

One of the things we like the most about the site is the layout. For each site in a given category, the five most recent headlines are listed. The page is split into three columns, so you can instantly look at lots of different headlines, but at the same time, not feel overwhelmed by text.

Citizen Journalism is nothing new. People have probably been sharing news with their peers since before verbal communication was invented. But over the last few years, the internet has given anyone with a computer a new venue for communication. And with the prices of digital cameras and audio/video gear continuing to fall, it doesn't take much to shoot a video and share it with the world.

The question is, if you shoot footage on your cellphone and post it to your blog, or even to a relatively established site like NewsVine, will anyone notice? The odds are not in your favor. But for the last few years, CNN has been accepting footage from amateur videographers and broadcasting it on television through its I-Report program.

Now CNN has launched a new site dedicated to citizen journalism. iReport.com differs from CNN's previous initiative in that nobody will be filtering or editing most of the content submitted by users. CNN may choose to use some of the citizen reports on the air, but as a standalone site, iReport is sort of like YouTube for amateur journalists.

Videos run the gamut from interviews with voters in presidential primary states to firsthand footage of disasters. You can sort videos chronologically, by most views, highest rated, or search the site. Or you can check out the "newsiest" videos, which is determined by how recently a video was uploaded, and what kind of response it has gotten from the community.

One question is whether people who had been planning newsworthy videos on posting videos to YouTube will be willing to use iReport. Our guess is yes, since there's a chance the cable news network might pick up their video and broadcast it nationally. But we're also wondering how CNN plans to keep people from posting less newsworthy items. How long do you think it will take before the iReport web site is littered with videos of teenagers talking to the camera about their Facebook profiles?

In this day and age, who has time for reading? You don't -- obviously. There's this site out there called PimpMyNews and it reads blogs aloud for you using text-to-speech software. You can even listen to the stories on an iPhone or iPod Touch through the site, and the service will even let you transfer stories onto your regular ol' iPod.

Despite being perfect for those too busy (lazy?) to read blogs, the site could also work in favor of the blind and others unable to read regular text. And for the skeptics: the text-to-speech software does a surprisingly decent job at being very understandable and comfortable enough to listen to, but others may be annoyed by the non-human elements in the the voice.

The folks behind snarky tech news/satire blog Uncov have decided to stop mocking startups and launch their own. Persai is a cross between a search engine and well, we're not really sure what else. Social bookmarking/discovery services like StumbleUpon, we suppose. But without the social aspect.

Here's how it works. You enter a couple of keywords for things you're interested in and Persai will search the web for articles and pages that might match your preferences. The more you use the page, the smarter it gets. If you click on a link, it figures that you'd like to see more pages like this one. If you ignore a link or click the reject button, Persai makes note of that as well.

The idea is that you can visit Persai on a regular basis to find articles you're interested in without entering any search terms after you've created your interests. But since the site seems to be laid out more like a search engine than a news page, we're not sure users will really treat it that way. Fortunately, you can also subscribe to RSS feeds for your interests, which seems like an incredibly useful feature. In theory, you'll be able to find articles from thousands of sites in your RSS reader without subscribing to thousands of RSS feeds. Of course, Persai's learning function will only work if you visit the main page, so you may have to use it for a little while before your RSS feed is really accurate.

Persai is currently in private beta, but you can request an invitation by signing up at the company's home page.

[via VentureBeat]

If you are looking for news items based on your interests, you might enjoy Tiinker. Tiinker allows you to rate news items from feeds and automatically finds more items based on what you liked and didn't like.

It works like this: as you go through news items and vote on them, Tiinker goes about learning what kind of news you would like more of. Give a post on technology a thumbs up and Tiinker will remember that you have a thing for tech.

At first glance it might look a bit like Digg - but you will quickly realize that it isn't, as the only social aspect to the site is a collection of the most popular posts. The only variable that affects what stories are dished up is what you have given a thumbs up or down to in the past. Also, you are unable to introduce new feeds into the system, and can't get recommendations by cross-referencing what you've liked with users who have had similar tastes.

Nitpicking aside, the idea behind Tiinker is nice. If you like a customized news portal that adapts to your tastes the more you use it, this is it. But, if Tiinker can figure out a way to include some more social features such as ranking RSS feeds by popularity and allowing users to add new feed items, this could grow into something of a personalized meme that tracks the best stories for the things you are interested in. Until then, Tiinker isn't bad as long as you don't mind some of the limitations.

[via Lifehacker]

Yahoo! is getting ready to take the wrapper off TechTicker, an online program aimed at technology investors.

TechTicker specifically targets technology stocks in a portal type environment. The new program will offer streaming video, blog posts and breaking news targeting the technology investment sector. The portal and show which are said to be launching in January 2008, pick up where Yahoo! Finance Vision left off in 2002. Thankfully high speed connections are far more common in 2007 and better video compression tools are available to make internet based shows a feasible reality, rather than a pipe dream (no, we're not poking fun at Yahoo! Pipes, ok, maybe just a little). As for the other financial information that will be displayed, we assume it will resemble what Yahoo! Finance already does, but targeting technology specific companies.

With Yahoo! Finance high on the list of financial sites, TechTicker could be headed for great things. Of course, track records aside, we will have to wait for the roll out in order to really decide.

Check out what Yahoo! Finance Vision looked like back in the day.