March 2006
4 tags
Screwed Again: Typepad Widgets
The folks at SixApart have announced Typepad widgets, which they define this way:
A widget is a piece of content or functionality provided by a third party that you can place in the siderail of your TypePad blog. Technically, it’s a snippet of HTML and/or JavaScript that you can manage like any other sidebar content module on your blog.
Great! I have been using the current...
4 tags
Xen Mendelsohn on Xellular Identity
Apropos of yesterday’s post on people self-identifying so much with their cell phones that they want to be buried with them, I have stumbled on a new voice, Xen Mendelsohl, a woman based in Israel who comments frequently on mobile culture in her Xellular Identity blog. She recently reported on cellular identity at the other end of the age spectrum:
[from Hey Doll, Bratz is...
7 tags
Is You Is, Or Is You Ain't: Strumpette, or...
I was alerted by Tara Hunt and others that Strumpette might be a puppette (which is my new term for phony character blogs). It’s kind of leftovers by this point, but the fisking of Strumpette by Mike Krempasky (see this, this, and this) with support from Doc Searls and Robert French, suggests that the blog may not be merely anonymous, but a total fabrication. Doc has a good summary of...
1 tag
People Are Being Buried With Mobile Devices
This is a strange riff on the self-identification that comes from using cell phones and blackberries:
[from BBC NEWS | Technology | Handsets get taken to the grave]
More people than ever are asking to be buried or cremated with their mobile phones when they die, say researchers.
I wonder what the per minute charge is for Death In and Death Out calling?
4 tags
Freemium is a Dreamium
Last week, Fred Wilson called for a name for the now-common business model of web start-ups:
Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.
I ...
2 tags
Web 2.0 Awards Zeitgeist
Pretty good pass at defining Web 2.0, although perhaps lacking the social dimension:
[from Web 2.0 Awards Zeitgeist]
What is Web 2.0?
As with all things online, the Web 2.0 phenomenon is somewhat amorphous. Semantically, tacking a version number to the Web doesn’t make sense (and few agree on what it means) but practically, “Web 2.0” refers to a recent rebirth of sites...
3 tags
First Look: OfferTrax
One of my clients, OfferTrax, has gone live with a pre-beta signup page. I particularly like the rotating tag line on the pslash page that offers various enigmatic explanations for what they are up to.
3 tags
Federated's Portal Goes Live
I guess I have a double incentive to get off my ass and plug the various javascripts that the guys at Federated Media sent me: not only will I someday start hosting some ads here, but I will also begin to show up on the new portal (or metablog, as Blogebrity calls it).
6 tags
A Pale Moon’s Shadow
Shelley Powers catches onto the millenialism that seems to be percolating around about blogging (see Jeneane Sessum’s, Ralph Brandi’s, and Antonella Pavese’s
posts on the subject).
Shelley sums up — or unravels? — one of the mysteries of online connectedness:
[from A Pale Moon’s Shadow]
Communities, friendships, a sense of companionship and sharing can’t...
4 tags
Listics - Frank Paynter’s New Blog
Frank Paynter is launching a new blog, Listics, and declares yesterday as Day One with a nod to the meme I started up with the launch of /Message.
Whatever you do Frank, don’t report it mainline. Create a sideblog for your progressive rank changes, or the readers will (rightly) howl at the moon.
6 tags
XP can be booted on the Intel Mac
So now I have a really good reason to buy a new Intel Powerbook: I will be able to boot Windows XP on it.
[from Windows XP-on-Mac contest declares winner]
A Macintosh enthusiast has apparently managed to load Windows XP on an Intel Mac, nabbing a nearly $14,000 prize.
For some days, there has been discussion that the person who goes by the handle “narf” had managed the...
2 tags
SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards
SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards is a long, long list of Web 2.0 apps presented in various categories. Some of them I haven’t even seen before! Too much innovation going on.
[pointer from Steve Rubel]
6 tags
publi.sh: disposable feeds
I was fooling with the new 9Cays which I recently described as “a new tool to help manage email conversations as a collaborative space online.” One of the features of the tool is that all email threads that you create with it have an RSS feed. It occured to me that I could use 9Cays as a fast way to set up a “side blog” — a mini blog stuck in the margin of my...
3 tags
Ok, I Fell For It: Wurk.net
Got this email, which seemed like a nice excursion after an extremely dense, although fruitful, interview with Linda Stone, the leading exponent of the pros and cons of Continuous Partial Attention (interview written up tomorrow):
blog finder More options 1:32 pm (41 minutes ago) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — 28 March 2006 –- blogfinder (beta), an experimental web 2.0 application...
5 tags
New Voices: Amanda Chapel (Strumpette)
I am predicting that Amanda Chapel will go far, and not just because she is showing a lot of Victoria’s Secret underwear in the banner of Strumpette, her brand new blog. She has true voice, and she’s not afraid to use it:
[from About - Strumpette]
What you’ll find here is an honest treatment of the PR business. Why? Because there really isn’t one. Some are sure...
4 tags
New Voices: Leisa Reichelt
I am resurrecting a project that I started some time ago at Get Real to try to find new voices, based on a call from Halley Suitt. I am not going to be too much of a stickler about race, gender, and geography — Halley was trying to counter the American white male dominance of the blogosphere. I have no quarrel with that, but it’s not exactly what I am trying to do.
No, I am...
6 tags
You Say It's Your Blirthday, You're Gonna Have A...
I haven’t seen much going on at Paolo Valdemarin’s blog recently — although my reading habits are very spotty — so it was kind of a sobering experience to read his 4 blog birthday, or blirthday, post.
Blogging allowed me to meet the most interesting people of my life, to get an infinite number of ideas, to develop new products, find new partner, new customers, to...
13 tags
Tim O'Reilly Interviews Bill Gates
Tim O’Reilly posted his pre-interview thoughts about his interview of Bill Gates at the Mix conference, here, and the full transcript of the discussion is buried in this page, at Microsoft’s site.
There are a few places were Tim seems to try to dig into the particulars of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 meanderings, like this question about the possible directions for Outlook:
TIM ...
11 tags
Steven Levy and Brad Stone on The New Wisdom of...
I expected to find the The New Wisdom of the Web cover article in Newsweek off the mark in some way: they would miss the point, or over glamorize it, or just get it completely wrong. Well, I was wrong. Steven Levy and Brad Stone do a great job, and not just because a lot of my favorite people grace its pages (like Stewart Butterfield and Catarina Fake of Flickr, and Mary Hodder of Dabble...
4 tags
A Shorthand For Disclosure: What Type Is This?
Years ago, on my first blog, I typed the various styles of email formats used by businesses. Type 1 was “firstnamelastname@company.com”, type 2 was “lastnamefirstname@company.com”, type 3 was “firstname_lastname@company.com”, and so on. I came up with a long list, as I recall, but the purpose was to simplfy life, so an individual or company could simply...
8 tags
Jeneane Sessum on The Mainstream Media IS the New...
Jeneane has a great post on the changing complexion of the blogging A-list — it’s becoming dominated by blog consortia:
[from The Mainstream Media IS the New Blogging A-List]
When I look around at the most subscribed to blogs in Bloglines, and not coincidentally many of the new breed in the Technoriati Top 100, I see the effects of RSS and ‘consumption-based...
11 tags
Suddenly nobody loves Raymond, particularly at Mic
If you were taking a poll among the digiterati right now, I think you’d find that Microsoft’s credibility would have fallen below the critical Richard Nixon stage, down into the 30% area or south of that. Amazing parallels with Bush and the lack of credibility there with Katrina and Iraq. In both cases, lots of management changes in the middle tiers — Michael Brown and the...
14 tags
What Web 2.0 Means to You: Simple Applications To...
I am presenting a webcast next week, called What Web 2.0 Means to You: Simple Applications To Help You Collaborate with Ease, on Wed 29 Mar 2006 at 10 am PT. Visit the link to register.
I will be posting the slides after the webcast for those that can’t get there.
Web 2.0: Cutting Through The Hype (and Antihype)—a lot has been written about Web 2.0, but what does it mean for the...
Platial And The NeoGeographers
I met Di-Ann Eisnor of Platial at the recent Etech in San Diego. Although she wasn’t presenting at the show, I wish she had: she gave a short talk during a press lunch, and it was a great intimation of things to come at the upcoming Where 2.0 conference (scheduled for 13-14 June in San Jose) that I wrote about here.
Di-Ann was in the news twice today. The first piece I read was early...
5 tags
Fred Wilson on My Favorite Business Model: Turning...
Fred wants to know what we should call the Skype/Flickr/Trillian business model:
[from A VC: My Favorite Business Model]
Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your...
24 tags
Join us at mesh
Mark your calendars for the upcoming (and rescheduled) mesh — Canada’s web 2.0 conference - Toronto May 15 & 16. mesh will bring together great keynotes and speakers, including Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, Andrew Coyne, Michael Geist, Tara Hunt, Paul Wells, Steve Rubel, Jason Fried, Stowe Boyd (yes, me), Amber McArthur, Ren Bucholz, Andrew Baron, Chris Messina, David Crow (whew!)...
6 tags
Tom Evslin on Wikipedia's Anti-blog Bias
Tom Evslin has an interesting post about his recent experience at Wikipedia, where he had created an entry on Advisory Capital (yes, the term I coined a month or so ago) that was “speedily deleted” because of anti-blog bias:
[from Wikipedians vs. Bloggers]
[…]
But Wikipedia is somewhat schizophrenic when it comes to blogs.
I realized this shortly after I created a...
8 tags
Yahoo Messenger: Syncing With The World Of Phones
Yahoo has released the next round of its efforts to get up to speed on the growing integration of desktop instant messaging with real world telphony through VoIP, as reported in PC Magazine. The Yahoo Messenger Phone In and Phone Out capabilities line up with Skype’s equivalent offerings, except that Yahoo is offering extremely attractive price points: two cents a minute for calls out...
7 tags
Larry Prusak: The World Is Round
I had a chance to speak with Larry Prusak, well known business guru, executive director of IBM’s Institute of Knowledge Management, and the author of Working Knowledge and In Good Company. He is planning a presentation for the upcoming Collaborative Technology Conference 2006 called The World Is Round, which he intends as a direct challenge of Thomas Freidman’s The World Is Flat...
8 tags
First Glimpse: Joga
Google and Nike have launched an online community for soccer fans called Joga, which requires an invitation from one of the existing users. The splash screen says:
Welcome to Joga - the community for soccer players dedicated to keeping the game beautiful.
Joga is a place to meet other soccer players, share your own soccer experiences and enjoy photos and videos from around the world.
...
5 tags
Trust and transparency
An email this morning introduced me to someone I was completely unaware of, alas, until today. At the Hypergene blog, Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman posted an interview with Karen Stephenson, whose new book is tantalizingly named Quantum Theory of Trust: The Secret of Mapping and Managing Human Relationships.
[from Trust in Transition: An Interview with Karen Stephenson]
Q: What is your...
6 tags
First Look: 9Cays
I was about to kick off a round of discussion regarding the next DC 2.0 get together, with my co-conspirators Dion Hinchcliffe and Ken Yarmosh, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to test out 9cays, which is a new tool to help manage email conversations as a collaborative space online.
I set up a 9cays account, and created a conversation by simply cc’ing go@9cays.com in the...
6 tags
Web 2.0 or Star Wars Quiz
Steve Rubel challenged the Web 2.0 Workgroup guys to take Cerado’s Web 2.0 or Star Wars Quiz, which makes you guess whether a word like Meebo is a Star Wars character or a Web 2.0 company. Steve got a 30, Jeff Clavier got a 33, and Mike Arrington — who the test designer singles out at the person likely to max the test — got a 35. But I edged him out for 36!
Still…...
6 tags
New Visionaries: Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra
Satish Dharharaj became the “demo god” at last fall’s Web 2.0 conference, when his presentation of Zimbra literally had the audience of hard-core techies applauding whenever he revealed yet another amazing feature in the Zimbra collaboration suite. His vision of an open application development platform being pulled from the Zimbra collaboration environment is both compelling...
6 tags
Blog Reports: Are The Traditional Analyst Firms...
I have maintained for years that the traditional analyst firms — like Gartner and Forrester — are, in general, way out of touch with what is going on at the creative fringe. To some extent, that makes sense, since their raison d’etre is to read the tea leaves for big, risk-averse, slow-moving, late adopter enterprises. With the exception of the occasional savant, like...
3 tags
Everything Has Been Blogged
I generally ignore the Adsense ads along the margin of my Gmail account, but this one I had to click. I caught the slug “Bored With Blogs” out of the corner of my eye, which linked to an “Everything Has Been Blogged” T-Shirt at CafePress.
I wonder if the blog burn-out meme is linked to global warming, or something. Am I the first to post something about this...
8 tags
Blogs - The Stage of our Lives
I think of Robert Scoble as a friend, and I appreciate the way he has come to the defense of Dave Winer — if that is the right word — in the newest twist of Dave’s recent travails.
I don’t want to dig into the pros and cons of Dave’s situation — aside to say that I hope he continues to blog despite his blog suicide comments — but instead to reflect...
4 tags
First Look: i4e
A new collaboration service for inventor-types called Invent4Equity, or i4e, launched today. The company behind the platform, Invequity, a company with deep experience in patent law, formed i4e “to provide inventors a better way to complete, patent, market, and license their inventions”.
The idea is to join, define some project, and then attract other people to join up to help...
5 tags
/Message joins Federated Media
I am really excited to announce that I am the newest Federale in the Federated Media network. Along with Web 2.0 Workgroup partner Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Federated Media’s John Battelle (Searchblog), Boing Boing, Digg, Om Malik’s GigaOm, and many others: good company.
Starting next week, expect to see new ads floating around.
11 tags
The Corporatization of Memetrackers: Netscape,...
Rafat Ali reports on the Netscape memetracker relaunch, which is just the first of a spate of news in the memetracker space:
[from Netscape.com To Be Relaunched As a Digg-Like Site; Calacanis Heading It]
The storied Netscape.com will be revived again by AOL, and will relaunch soon as a Digg-like user-driven news/aggregation site with Jason Calacanis at the helm, sources have told...
6 tags
MarketingMonger Podcast #3: Interview with Stowe...
I was interviewed yesterday (via telephone from Stockholm) by Eric Mattson of MarketingMonger, a guy who plans to interview 1000 people in what is likely to be a multi-year project:
[from The Blog Post That Launched One Thousand Podcasts]
So…taking a page from Greek Mythology, with this post I’m launching a project to conduct ONE THOUSAND podcast interviews of marketers,...
4 tags
MarketingMonger Podcast #3: Interview with Stowe...
It has been a long time coming, but I am happy to announce that the first of the New Visionaries series that I started last year is being rolled out starting today. The first in the series is an interview with Jason Fried of 37 Signals.
[from the intro]
The impact they [37 signals] are having on the world is larger than the success of their apps, like Basecamp. It could be that the larger...
14 tags
Capital Comment: DC 2.0, a Bi-Partisan...
Dion Hinchcliffe captured some great pictures at the DC 2.0 event last night, which was our first get together.
Here’s the poster, showing the hosts — Dion, Jonathan Aberman of Amplifier Venture Partners, and me (Ken Yarmosh was out of town, although one of the organizers) — and the various companies presenting: Blogdigger, CollectiveX, Near-Time, SMBLive, x:posted, and...
7 tags
John Furrier's PodTech.net Receives Series A Round...
Congratulations to John Furrier, whose podcasting obsession has grown to be something much more than a hobby:
[from PodTech. net: PodTech Receives $5.5 Million in Series A Funding.
“PodTech has become the definitive source of quality, content-rich podcasts dedicated to innovating and extending the benefits of podcasting to mainstream users,” said John Furrier, Founder and CEO of PodTech....
7 tags
Performancing Metrics: A Solid Start
I have tried a slew of blog metrics tools, including MeasureMap (my fave), Blogflux (my former choice, which just stopped updating one day), BuddyMap, SiteMetrics, and I don’t know how many others over the years. Now Performancing has entered the fray with its newly announced metrics tool.
So, I tried it, and it failed for me immediately. My blog is “/message”, but it keeps...
4 tags
First Take: PageBites
Trying to create a new player in the crowded job marketplace, PageBites allows job seekers or employers to post a link to their existing bios and job descriptions, or to post them at PageBites.
I did a search for “AJAX” in jobs with 50 miles of Reston VA as a prep for the DC 2.0 State of Web 2.0 get-together tonight — see the results. There were several pages of jobs...
4 tags
Ron Jeffries on Winer’s Blog Suicide Note?
Put aside all the questions about Winer’s plans to quit blogging. Ron Jeffries has a simple notion as to why he is contemplating blog suicide. He’s not tired, or suffering a midlife crisis: he’s in love:
[from Winer’s Blog Suicide Note?]
My remote psychological profiling service has uncovered a far more interesting, and — depending on your point of view– more troubling...
6 tags
Socializr Isolatr Snubster Networkr Backlashr
Michael Arrington thinks there might be a little (a little?) backlash against social networks, and mentions Isolatr and Snubster.
But he overlooks Nemester:
Nemester The new way to make enemies™
Nemester is an online community that connects paranoids, egotists, villains, and monomaniacs through networks of competing agendas and incompatable ideologies for bitter conflicts, mutual...
5 tags
Fleck: Tongue-in-Cheek, but Beta is Coming!
I stumbled across Fleck.com courtesy of Marjolein Hoekstra, whose CleverClogs blog I just found out about. A search revealed that Michael Arrington wrote something about Fleck not too long ago, but he wasn’t sure if it was a joke or real. The site is funny:
Welcome to Fleck.com Web Democracy Now!
Fleck is: patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience...
6 tags
Kent Newsome on The Blog Commons: What Is...
Kent Newsome really likes my recent response to Seth Godin’s Tragedy of the Commons lament.
Stowe Boyd nails the whole noisy blogosphere thing. He says it perfectly. There’s nothing I can add so let me quote reverently one passage:
It has become the conventional wisdom to reel off those sorts of pronouncements in conference halls and hallways, and lament the loss of…...
