May 16, 2008
I just spoke at the Social Rockstar Workshop at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. about Social Media & Blogging. It was a great conversation and thank you to everyone that attended. I have uploaded to docstoc the online document sharing site for anyone that would like to take a look at the presentation.
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May 11, 2008
SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending May 11, 2008.
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April 27, 2008
SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending April 27, 2008.
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April 2, 2008
Taking a page out the Netflix and Amazon playbook, outbrain, a New York-based startup, officially launched yesterday to offer a ratings and recommendations widget for content. With outbrain bloggers, news, media, magazines, rss readers and other publishers/aggregators can add a rating and personalized content recommendation widget to their blogs and sites easily and free.
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March 27, 2008
If you are in the Washington, D.C. area, mark your calendars for BlogPotomac, a one day event aimed at providing advanced marketing insights beyond the average social media 101. BlogPotomac will be held on Friday, June 13, 2008 at the State Theater in Falls Church, Virginia. BlogPotomac seeks to provide a local “un-conference” on best marketing practices for the social media community in the D.C. metro area.
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March 23, 2008
SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending March 23, 2008.
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February 27, 2008
Looking to explore and find a few new blogs on the Web? Blogged is blog directory launched earlier this week to aid discovery and exploration of the blogosphere. Blogged is self-funded by founders Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong and is powered by readers and also employs a full-time editorial staff to maintain the integrity of the directory.
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January 24, 2008
Microblogging platforms have been springing up like crazy these days as bloggers look for easier and shorter form ways to quickly express themselves online. Lifestreaming to these platforms also become more prevalent as an aggregation of online activities. I am a big fan of microblogging platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Soup.io. They offer a light but powerful platform for self-expression. But there is not a one size fits all solution for every blogger. Chyrp (found deceptively at chyrp.net) offers an open source blogging platform that is more of a medium weight blogging solution.
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December 26, 2007
Looking to record split-screen multi-user videos via your web camera? I am. While there are a number of video platforms that offer single web cam video recording, I recently set forth on a quest for find the ultimate online video product for recording multi-user web camera videos. I came across a site called Tjoon. Tjoon, a startup created by Suite75, offers an easy way to record split-screen multi-user videos via a web camera.If you know of a better solution for recording split-screen multi-user video please let me know.
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December 14, 2007
Distributing content is key to any serious blogger. There are a number of social news and sharing sites offering bloggers the ability to have sharing features on their site. Adding all the icons to your blog can cause some serious 'icon acne' and cramp the style of any blog design. So it is important to make it easy for your blog readers to share your content with others and social news sites alike. madKast, a Boulder, Colorado based start-up, recently launched to offer a way for bloggers to make sharing easy.
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December 1, 2007
I got a chance to chat with Greg "The Trend Junkie" Cangialosi today regarding his new book "The Business of Podcasting Book." The book is a great guide for any corporate executive or other party interested in better understanding podcasting. Greg and I leveraged BlogTV, a split screen webcam video platform I previously highlighted on Somewhat Frank, to chat about a number of topics related to social media from discussing our podcasting pal Gary Vaynerchuk who has been changing the wine world to a quick getting started with podcasting step-by-step.
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November 26, 2007
Brica what? BricaBox, a New York-based startup, offers a publishing platform for organizing and displaying content in a more structured manner. It's goal is to offer a more structured way to present content. Wondering why you might need more structure? Read on to find out how you might be able to use BricaBox.
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September 26, 2007
This has truly been an action packed 2007 web/tech conference season thus far. I previously listed a number of conferences to attend in 2007 but as of late a number of new ones have popped up. I wanted to highlight few additional conferences as they are approaching fast and you might want to get your tickets booked now. You will find me speaking at these three conference...hope to see you there.
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September 11, 2007
Typepad, the popular hosted blog platform by SixApart, has announced a new iPhone optimized interface. Typepad users can now visit http://i.typepad.com on an iPhone or the new iPod Touch in their Safari Web browser use an optimized version of Typepad.
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September 3, 2007
If you are looking for a way to cut corners when it comes to updating your online status you might want to give twitterfeed.com a try. Twitterfeed.com turns twitter into a status feed aggregator as you can pull all your status updates into one place and then publish them all to twitter.
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August 23, 2007
AdaptiveBlue, a startup that focuses on a smarter browsering experience, has created feed output for its SmartLink functionality. This is feature called appropriately, SmartLink Feeds will make it easy for anyone to take pull in the feed from a SmartLinks widget and display it on their blog, website or personalized homepage. SmartLinks are collected via AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer.
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August 19, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 19, 2007.
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August 5, 2007
Photo of the Week: Barry Bonds hit home run 755 last night in a game vs. San Diego tying Hank Aaron for most career home runs in Major League history. John Feeley was in attendance and captured history with his zoom lens in this shot (shown above). Somewhat Frank Weekly...
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July 15, 2007
Photo of the week: These green frog cupcakes were spotted and then were quickly devoured at the most recent TECH cocktail in Chicago. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.15.07 AOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking Nielsen/NetRatings will begin reporting total sessions and total time spent on a site in order...
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June 17, 2007
Photo of the Week: Jen Consalvo recently snapped this photo titled backlight. A little sunshine is a beautiful thing and is good for the soul - this little yellow guy appears to agree. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 06.17.07 YouTube Remixer: Edit Videos Online At YouTube YouTube has officially launched YouTube...
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March 13, 2007
Looking for a place to aggregate your thoughts in a scrapbook fashion online? Tumblr is a simple microblog platform and might be just what you are looking for to post your thoughts, images and videos. Tumblr offers a six different types of posts which include: a regular post, quote, photo,...
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March 12, 2007
Sphere, the blog search engine that launched in May 2006, has been steadily disseminating and connecting the web via the "Sphere It" contextual widget. The widget has grown in popularity as it helps readers offer content recommendations from the blogosphere, as well as related content from current sites. It ultimately...
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March 5, 2007
Is your site mobile ready? .mobi has launched, ready .mobi, a mobile-readiness test to help site owners. You simply put in your URL and using industry best practices & standards you find out if the site is mobile ready. Unfortunately, Somewhat Frank is not currently fully mobile ready. You can...
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January 16, 2007
Do you obsess about data? If so, Swivel might be able to help feed your obsession as it lets you explore, compare, share and upload data and graphs about politics, economics, weather, sports, business and beyond. Swivel offers a free social-based reposistory and charting tool for interesting graphs and data...
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January 9, 2007
Woohoo, an AOL Pictures by-product, recently upgraded to offer a more robust Flash-based snaggable photo slideshow widget. The previous widget offered the ability to show images in a clickable stack called the photo collage as shown below or by visiting this link. The upgraded version of woohoo offers not only...
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January 5, 2007
Leafletter recently launched a simple application which enables users to create animated widgets that can be embedded into blogs, social networks and other web sites. These widgets are called "Leaflets" and can be used to display photos and other information in a unique and interesting fashion. Leaflets are Flash based...
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December 15, 2006
FeedBurner, a Chicago-based feed management company, has announced the roll-out of a site metrics offering. The product is an integration of BlogBeat, a product they acquired in July 2006. FeedBurner site metrics will track: Page Views and estimated unique visitors Detailed 'by visitor' statistics Incoming links including search query referrals...
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December 11, 2006
ReviewMe an online product review broker recently launched as highlighted previously on Somewhat Frank. Like many other bloggers I inquisitively registered Somewhat Frank for the service. Thirty days have passed and I wanted to follow-up with some additional thoughts on my first experiences with the service. To date ReviewMe has...
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November 16, 2006
Techmeme, an aggregator of tech related news content founded by Gabe Rivera, pulls together a real-time clusters of the hottest technology related content on the web. How does a publisher get content highlighted on Techmeme? Gabe recently answered this question by saying: 1.) Focus on content 2.) Enable discovery of...
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October 20, 2006
Yesterday (October 19, 2006) I had the opportunity to represent AOL at the Six Apart Business Blogging Seminar in Washington, DC. The event was a half day seminar focusing on politics and advocacy. It was supposed to be lead by Six Apart's Anil Dash but unfortunately, Anil was ill so...
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August 23, 2006
Looking for bloggers? Or looking for a blogging gig? Problogger recently launched The Problogger Job Board to help connect bloggers and employers. Postings are $100 for 30 days. Darren Rowse explained recently that he was sick of getting emails asking: "I’m looking for a blogger/coblogger for my blog but I’m...
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August 20, 2006
Socialmeter aggregates how many links are being counted in several of the social search web sites. Currently, Socialmeter is tracking del.icio.us, Digg, furl, Google, Jots, Linkroll, Reddit, Shadows, Spurl, Technorati and Yahoo MyWeb. Socialmeter could be a decent tool to get a quick idea of how many people are linking...
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August 3, 2006
The Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog, a blog which was created by the Weblogs Works team, recently was temporarily shut down by Weblogs Works. Just to bring you up to speed: "Brian Oberkirch became a national figure last year when he covered the Hurricane Katrina disasater real time on his blog,...
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August 2, 2006
Yahoo! under the guidance of summer intern Paul Stamatiou has launched Yodel Anecdotal a blog focused on capturing the Yahoo culture and exposing it to the blogosphere. I think it is great to see a large corporation like Yahoo create a blog just to showcase its culture. The blog is...
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July 28, 2006
David Sifry, founder of Technorati, offers some advice on breaking into the Technorati top 100 blogs list: 1) React quickly. 2) Make your posts easy to read. 3) Link, link, link! 4) Optimize for search engines. 5) Post, post, post! Additionally, I would recommend writing compelling content. Here is the...
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July 24, 2006
Technorati, the popular blog search engine, has turned three today and has launched a new homepage design. Technorati is more than just a blog search engine it is a "live web search engine" and offers a number of different features that make it a destination more than just a search...
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July 18, 2006
Somewhat Frank has gotten a much needed makeover. I guess it took a longtime reader to finally convince me that the distorted blue image of my head (shown to the right) was not the way to go. Thanks Orli! So I took a look at Somewhat Frank with critical eyes...
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June 27, 2006
With the two posts today, numbers 567 and 568 respectively, the Somewhat Frank blog has turned one year 0ld - and what a year it has been. It has been a wonderful adventure through the blogosphere which started with a simple business trip to attend a (pre-Katrina) New Orleans conference....
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June 26, 2006
Automattic, the company that has created WordPress which powers many of the weblogs in the blogosphere today, has just launched a level of enterprise called the Automattic Support Network. According to a recent blog post on Toni Schneider’s blog the support level is in response to customer demand. I think...
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May 20, 2006
I just participated in the first waxxi Interactive Podcast event with Robert Scoble and Shel Israel authors of the book Naked Conversations and it was an amazing experience. Waxxi's interactive podcast enabled me to connect with Robert, Shel and everyone else on the call making it a very rich conversation....
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May 19, 2006
A few blogging tips and resources and how to's on getting started in the blogosphere posted on SOMEWHAT FRANK.
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April 16, 2006
I recently listened to a Ruby on Rails Podcast interview recorded at SXSWi (March 12, 2006) of Shaun Inman the creator of Mint. I had never heard of Mint before so I spent my time listening for clues to answer my puzzlement. What is Mint? It turns out Mint is...
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April 5, 2006
Apartments.com, a vertical owned by Classified Ventures, recently launched the first corporate blog in the history of the company to coincide with the Apartments.com Room to Move Contest. The contest offers anyone 21 to 30 who still is living at home or with relatives to tell their story and potentially...
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March 23, 2006
Gigapets? Rhett Miller? Sushi? What IS Big in Japan? Big in Japan is a (surprisingly Texas-based US-based) company in the process of completing a "Web 2.o toolkit" which includes a number of valuable services to help bloggers promote their blogs. Big in Japan calls its products "pro-sumer" products since they...
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March 13, 2006
WordPress.com continues to improve the free blogging platform as they have recently rolled out new widget features. These widgets are sidebar or rail elements which allow for additional customization to your blog. I first noticed the widget features while blogging on Ballpark Frank a few days ago. I stumbled upon...
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March 13, 2006
The Technology Evangelist team continued to hunt innovators as they swung into Chicago about a month ago to meet-up with for Episode 2 of online video series called The Innovators. You may recall Episode 1 which I highlighted recently which included the interview with Derek Franklin. Episode 2 features me...
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March 4, 2006
With the baseball season on its way I decided I wanted to be able to express some of my thoughts related to the game and I did not think that Somewhat Frank was the most appropriate venue. So I launched a new blog called Ballpark Frank. I thought a second...
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February 12, 2006
Are you ever short of words while writing a blog post? Do you like to find new words to add flair to your posts? If the answer is yes to either of those questions then you are going to love Visual Thesaurus. Visual Thesaurus is product by Thinkmap that maps...
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January 11, 2006
It has been awhile since I have posted on Somewhat Frank with helpful tips on how to blog so with the new year I thought I would do so to try to reach out and help new bloggers unfamiliar with the blogosphere. I produced a PowerPoint slide deck aimed at...