Microsoft has introduced enhanced mobile product search at m.live.com. It shrinks down the content from the desktop product search into a bite-sized mobile presentation. You get images, reviews, product specifications, and features. These things don’t come up for every category; however, it’s a very nice presentation of information, and the available categories should grow rapidly.

The company has simultaneously introduced “Find My Location,” based on cell phone tower triangulation, for Japan and the UK.

Here are some screens of the product search beta for mobile:

The “Find My Location” feature is similar to Google’s My Location feature and works on the same principle of triangulating user location via proximity to cell towers. It saves the step of entering location before searching.

(These capabilities will also allow, in the future, for more locally precise paid search results.)

The combination of Find My Location and product search will one day (soon) enable people to find real-time inventory in local stores on the go. That capability is currently rolling out on the desktop. For now, however, the new mobile product search is valuable as a way to compare products in the store and check price information.

A 2006 consumer survey by the e-Tailing Group found that roughly 19 percent of shoppers visit local stores and then buy online at least some of the time.

Sigh. As someone who produces a podcast – and who has enjoyed searching for podcasts when going on roadtrips — I don’t get why podcast search isn’t more supported by the major search engines. Yahoo Podcasts, rolled out with promise back in October 2005, now sports a message at the top of the page saying "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."

Nice job, Yahoo. What, you can’t even post a link to a reason why you’re closing? No advice for what the podcast owners that actually promoted your service, about what they’re supposed to do with their channels? Is the site going poof, just not being supported at all in the future, or what?

Odeo used to be my podcast search site of choice. I could easily find top podcasts, see recommendations and more. Then the site slowly had features pulled and felt abandoned. Maybe the recent sale and relaunch planned for December will help. We’ll see.

Like Yahoo, AOL jumped in with a lot of hype when launching podcast search back in 2005. But when I did my recent look at AOL search services, I had to really hunt to find it. Looking again today, it doesn’t appear to even search for podcasts any longer. I can’t find my own Daily SearchCast, nor do searches seem to produce any podcast segment of the results. This is despite saying Podcast 101 right at the top. Instead, you have to know where AOL Search Audio is located, and who knows if that will last.

Podzinger was a long-standing service not run by a major search engine, but it rebranded itself EveryZing recently to incorporate video – because you know, it’s all about the video these days. After all, looking back to the majors, where’s Google Podcast Search? Microsoft Podcast Search? But over a billion to buy YouTube — no problem. They’ll chase the video ad cash with video search and ignore the fact that plenty of people listen to podcasts. How about a little love for them?

At least EveryZing does let you find podcasts. And I’ve found Digg Podcasts to be a useful way to find some interesting shows. Up Close With Digg Podcasts is my past review of the service. It’s coming up on one year in beta, and somehow I suspect it will sadly go the way of Yahoo Podcasts.

Yes, I know — there’s always iTunes. Sure, if I want to fire up Apple’s proprietary music software, I can head over there and find things. What a pain – especially when I want to download podcasts for my TomTom GPS, not for my iPod.

Read/WriteWeb seems the first to have spotted the closure and has some comments here, plus you can see a roundup of reaction on Techmeme here.

Following in the recent footsteps of Technorati, which morphed into a multi-media search engine, podcast search engine Podzinger has added video and rebranded itself EveryZing, a stronger and (paradoxically) less confusing brand.

Google introduced video into Google.com results with the roll out of Universal Search and the new Ask3D prominently features video (search provided by Blinkx).

EveryZing is now also offering “white label” audio and video search to third party sites a la Blinkx.

Postscript: PaidContent has details on a second $10 million round of funding for the company, which also claims that its search technology for audio and video clips is more accurate and advanced than competitors.

Neil Patel covered the new podcast feature at Digg in yesterday’s story, The New Digg Features Plus, A Submitter’s Perspective, but I wanted to take a deeper look at how it works plus maybe entice a few votes for my own podcast, The Daily SearchCast, along the way.

Having played with a number of podcast directories over the past year, Digg Podcasts is surprisingly traditional. The main page shows the most popular shows (shows, not individual episodes), similar to how you’ll see these at Yahoo Podcasts. Unlike Yahoo, Digg popularity is determined by the number of diggs.

As Neil noted, the most unusual thing in the voting is that unlike regular Digg, currency isn’t a factor. In other words, the Digg home page is designed to constantly be refreshed with stories that the community finds interesting. Stories will come and go as time passes.

The Digg podcast page is almost certainly going to be far more static, with the most popular podcasts among the Digg community getting voted up to the top and staying there over time. It will be a great surprise if Digg’s own podcast, Diggnation, ever slips from the number one spot.

Beyond seeing the most popular podcasts, you can also drill down to see podcasts grouped into categories. These are all listed at the top of the Digg Podcast area and range from Arts/Culture to TV/Film.

Categories aren’t special. Yahoo and Odeo both do the same, such as Yahoo’s food category or Odeo’s science category. As with the main page, podcasts within each area are ranked by number of diggs.

Each podcast has its own page, from where you can then view individual episodes. For example, here’s the Daily SearchCast on Digg. You can see a description of the podcast, use the "Show Podcast Details" link to get more information about the author, podcast website and podcast feed plus see current episodes.

Episodes are NOT listed in order of most diggs, unlike elsewhere in Digg Podcasts. You can notice this by looking at the Diggnation page, where some episodes with lots of diggs are listed below those with fewer. Instead, podcasts are listed chronologically. That makes sense, though it would be nice to see a feature come along to rerank episodes by diggs received.

Episodes appear to accumulate over time. For example, the Daily SearchCast currently only shows episodes back through Nov. 14. That matches the number of episodes shown in the current feed. As new episodes get added, I expect that new Digg pages will be created for them. However, Digg’s making no attempt to spider or go back and build up archives of past shows.

That highlights a missing feature. What if there’s a special show you want to feature or someone else wants to feature? There’s no way to submit individual episodes, if they are not already listed. Instead, you can only submit the overall show.

Submission of shows is slightly different than the Digg norm. In general, submitting your own content is frowned upon in Digg. It’s not impossible to do, but it’s something that should be done with care and respect for the community, hopefully accompanied by a history of having contributed lots of quality material over time.

In contrast, I see no reason why anyone should hesitate from submitting their own podcast. Mine was already listed with Digg. But if it wasn’t, I’d have gone in and done it myself.

I say to be relaxed about this because the submission is tied heavily to the podcast feed itself. You’ll find a submission box near the top right-hand side of the screen, called Add New Podcast. Before using it, search to see if you can find the podcast you want, to make sure it’s not already in. No? Then submit away.

I submitted Jason Calacanis’s CalacanisCast, to see how the process works, since my podcast was already in Digg. Well, I tried to. Despite giving Digg the valid feed, it kept kicking me back to the Add New Podcast page. Maybe the thought of listing Jason’s podcast was too much to bear!

I tried again, this time with the Vegan Radio podcast. That went through, bringing me up this page:

All the information shown comes from the podcast’s feed — even the category. Within the XML are these key fields that Digg is using:

I’m uncertain if Digg is using the description or the itunes:summary field to make descriptions. I’ll check on this, but that’s why I’ve listed them both. But whatever is in these areas, that’s how Digg lists a site. I’m also checking on whether it is the itunes image or the standard image tag that Digg uses to make a podcast image.

Other things I’m checking is what happens if you don’t list a category for your podcast or what if they don’t match exactly or nearly to an existing Digg category. Most podcasts I know of make use of iTunes categories. Digg seems to match all of these other than Society & Culture.

Another question is how often is information refreshed. How long does it take Digg to discover you have a new episode? When that happens, if you’ve changed your overall feed information, how long until that updates. Answers to all of these things will be postscripted to this story.

Be aware that after you submit, the podcast has to be approved. Currently, this seems to take less than a day to show up.

Another issue is that Digg voting buttons for your site don’t seem to work. You’ll find the code here, but when I install it as below, it generates an error:

As I said, I’m checking on some of these issues. Returning to the service from a user’s perspective, I like that you can choose to listen right within the Digg site if you want to, using the little Listen buttons next to each episode. In fact, I’d like to see them make a page or tool explaining how to include a Digg listen button on your own site or perhaps one combined with a Digg voting button. I may cobble the code together later myself, when I have more time.

Part of me also wants some type of podcast owner "claim" tool. But given that Digg is interacting with your actual feed, that effectively puts the site owner in control. But a combined "Digg This/Listen Tool" as I’ve mentioned would be pretty nice.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the new tool. I used to love Odeo, until they seemed to have abandoned the service. Looking at Odeo today, it seems impossible to browse and drill down into any shows that aren’t actually featured. Next time I’m on a road trip, I’m going to hit Digg to see if there’s anything good to download for the journey.

Finally — if you like the Daily SearchCast, c’mon over and add your diggs to help the show be more visible to others! You’ll find our page on Digg here.

Today, Kevin Rose announced the release of new Digg features. What most people covered in the release were all the cool additions, but no one really talked about the small changes that have drastically affected submitters. Before I dig into these small changes that affected submitters, here is a quick recap of the new features that everyone is talking about:

1. Digg is now made for big widescreen monitors. If you have a large monitor the site will now adjust the content so you can make use of your entire screen.
    
2. Each section on Digg now has a top 10 story listing on the right side. This area shows you the hottest 10 stories on Digg even if they are not on the homepage anymore.
    
3. Because the video section did so well when version 3 was launched, they decided to create a separate section for it. They are also using fancy javascript which allows you to now watch videos on Digg so you don’t have to go to the actual source to watch them.
    
4. In the last few years the growth of podcasting has been phenomenal. Due to this Digg decided to add a podcasts section where users can submit podcasts and vote on them. At the current moment this feature is only available to registered users.

Now that you know all the details that the Digg crew decided to share with you, here are some the other changes that they did not talk about:

Digg Friends: You Can No Longer See Your "Friends"

The Digg friends feature is the main way people are gaming the system. Users friend each other on Digg and digg each others’ stories, which makes it easy for users to get stories to the homepage.

Before on Digg, you could see all the users that made you a friend, so you could make sure to friend them back and vote on all of their submissions. In this recent update, they took that feature out. Now you can friend people, but you can’t see who has added you as a friend.

This was probably removed to help stop gaming of the system and to stop new users from creating accounts and becoming a top 100 user in 30 days. The downside of this is that it will keep the top users up there and also make it much harder to out perform them.

Postscript: The friends feature will go back to the old style; Digg has said it was left off by mistake.

Top Users

Before it seemed that there was more emphasis on the top users. Now it seems that Digg is trying to steer visitors away from that section by moving the top users link to the footer area instead of where it used to be in the sidebar. Although the top users will probably still control Digg, this small change may change that perception of many of the average users have.

New Voting System & Podcasts Ordered By Most Votes, Rather Than Latest, Greatest

Kevin Rose made a video that covers many of the new features he released. One of the things he went over is the podcasts section and how it works, but if you look closely it seems that the voting system for the podcasting section is different. The whole purpose of Digg is to see what is new and the latest and greatest, but with the voting scheme of the podcasts section it seems that the same podcasts might end up staying at the top for a prolonged period of time. Maybe they did this because they don’t feel enough new podcasts come out that are hits. This new voting system for the podcast section might be a hint of some ways that Digg might change their normal voting system.

Keeping Users On Digg

The new video section is great for users because it allows them to watch videos on Digg, but it is not great for websites that host the videos. YouTube wants people to go to their site so they can increase their pageviews and ad revenue; this change keeps users on Digg and away from the websites hosting the videos. By doing this, they also may be reducing the temptation for marketers to leverage Digg for their viral video campaigns because less people will go to the marketer’s website.

Overall the new Digg is a good improvement because it should improve the quality of content on Digg and help stop new users from spamming. So far, the reactions from users have been positive, but once they realize all the changes and how these changes really affects them, it will be interesting to see if they change their minds.

Postscript From Danny: See also Up Close With Digg Podcasts (& Vote For The Daily SearchCast!) now up from me, taking a closer look at the podcast feature.