Breaking: YouTube Clicks Into Retail

What peer pressure has to do with revolutionizing social media monetization.

THIS JUST IN

YouTube just announced its first move into retail land: click-to-buy links in music videos. Like most Google initiatives, the move is informed by pure organic consumer demand — Google folks noticed that the comment area below vides is fertile ground for consumer discussion of the music used in a video, so they jumped on the opportunity with an e-commerce platform that provides the answer in a direct click-to-buy format.

Currently available to U.S. users only, the platform links to iTunes and Amazon downloads from the EMI Music catalog, but is said to eventually expand into other media like TV, film and print.

We, of course, are not surprised — if it were any other company, Google would be doing this mainly as a reaction to the monetize-YouTube-already peer pressure, but because it’s Google, we know that no action is ever a reaction. There are greater forces at play, and we’re here to tug at their toys.

>>> More at the Official Google Blog

Image Search Redefined

How to hunt down interestingness by its hexadecimal color.

It’s been a while since we’ve stumbled across something along the lines of PicLens, retrievr and the Flickr Related Tag Browser.

Today, we bring you another inspired algorithm that revolutionizes the image search experience.

The Multicolr Search Lab, offers color-based search, spitting out images in up to 10 colors you’ve specified. Out of the equally inspired Idée Labs, a self-proclaimed “technology playground for visual search,” Multicolr utilizes the proprietary Piximilar visual similarity search technology that scours large collections of images without using keywords or metadata.

The Multicolr Search Lab is currently available for Flickr and Alamy Stock Photography. The Flickr version extracts the colors from over 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images. The notion of “interesting” is actually one of Flickr’s own cool algorithms that assesses an image’s “interestingness” based on various meta elements like where the clickthroughs are coming from, who comments on it and when, who marks it as a favorite, its tags and more.

Because these factors are in constant flux, so is the “interestingness” of any given image — something meant to inspire more exploration and discovery inside Flickr.

And while our 8th-grade English Lit teacher used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby,” we have to admit this brand of interestingness falls squarely on the baby pagent side.

Mac Guy Speaks Up

Because nothing says “Mac Guy” better than a smartass passive-aggressive comment about PC Guy.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

After last week’s rather scandalous exposé on the whole Mac vs. PC thing, we find out today that Mac OS market share has hit an all-time high at 8.28%, at the expense of Windows’ slow but steady fall from the 90.24% top.

Okay, no surprise, as we believe settling for the inferiority of a PC operating system is one of modern civilization’s most irrational and logic-devoid transgressions, right up there with Spandex, Hummers and George W.

But our quote of the week comes from our Swiss Mac brethren, specifically one CNN commenter unambiguously nicknamed “cynik”:

“A mac is a kitchen in your home, where you prepare your favourite delicacies.

A pc is a camp kitchen for a pack of grunts whose opinion doesn’t matter to their management.”

So much for neutrality.