Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

If you recall, YouTube recently added a new feature for its users to know more about who are watching their videos, when and where from. They called it YouTube Insight, and it works in the background, gathering data as you keep on uploading new videos and new people watch your old ones. They said they would update Insight with new features soon, and they have made good on their word so far as they have just rolled out one additional feature.

YouTube added Discovery metrics into Insight, to show how users found your video, whether it be through a Google search, YouTube search, an external link, an embedded video player, or through related videos on one of YouTube’s video pages. It will also list up to 50 of the external sites that are linking to your video, as well as the specific YouTube or Google search terms used to locate your video.

To access this new feature, simply log in to your YouTube account, go to “Account” > “My Videos” and then click on “About this video” (soon to become “Insight.") It doesn’t seem to be working for newer videos and those that haven’t been viewed yet for at least a thousand times, but if you have some videos with a couple thousand page views, I’m sure you’ll be able to give it a test drive.

Via [YouTube Blog]

As someone who hasn’t been watching TV for more than a year now in favor of my gadgets (especially the handhelds) I can see where Research and Markets’s recent report is coming from. According to this new report, there are going to be more multimedia phones sold than TV sets this year. You can see evidence of this just by walking down the street. You don’t see a lot of people walking with TV sets in their pockets now, don’t you? All jokes aside though, as that is not the case with cellphones and handhelds in general, most people can even afford to carry more than one handset with them everyday. Also, I think another reason for this is because mobile phones in general, not just multimedia-enabled ones, are now a commodity. And most households only really need one TV set for the entire home, while everyone in the family needs their own, individual mobile handset.

Via [IntoMobile] Via [Textually]

A report from Reuters cites Asustek Chairman Jonney Shih as saying nearly two-thirds of the Eee PCs to be shipped this year will carry Windows XP instead of the originally installed Linux OS. An analyst at JP Morgan commented that this is because a Windows-based Eee PC is “more attractive” to users due to the lack of familiarity with Linux, among other things. Now, although I agree that a Windows-based Eee PC will be more familiar to consumers than a Linux-powered one, I think this will go against the vision of the company for low-cost, consumer-affordable mobile computers. Linux is an efficient platform supported by a dedicated community of users and developers and of course its biggest selling point is that anyone can take it for free. Compare that to a Windows OS that you have to pay a few hundred dollars for, plus the fact that there have been a lot of reported bugs that keep it from operating smoothly. I’m sure you’ve realized by now that I’d prefer Linux over Windows (just for the Eee PC) but if you disregard that, I think you’d still agree that having a “retail” OS goes against the original vision of Asus for keeping the costs low, even if Windows lowers its pricing for XP for the sake of cheap computers like this one. At any rate, it will still be up to the user whether they use XP or Linux when they finally buy the Eee PC (if they haven’t already).

Read [Reuters]

Looks like lots of people are looking for friends. Online data company, Hitwise, announced that MySpace was five of the ten most searched terms across all categories in 2006. Variations of MySpace that made it include: “myspace” (0.63%) at the top, “myspace.com” (0.41%) came in second, “www.myspace.com” (0.18%) sixth, “my space” (0.14%) eighth and “myspace layouts” (0.14%) ninth. Scores were based on a 10 million US Internet users over a 52 weeks and it does not include “Adult category” search terms.

I find it interesting that “myspace” and “myspace layouts” are considered two unique terms even though they both contain the same word. I suppose if you enclose it in quotes it is considered a unique term regardless of the number of spaces/words, though it’d be nice to see a report that realistically recognizes essentially identical search words and breaks it down into variations and strings.

And for everyone searching for words like “myspace” - do you really need to search for a site when its name is the dern URL? C’mon people.  Here’s a look at the lists:

Site [MySpace] Site [Hitwise]