July 8, 2008
Setting your status message on a social networking application has become fairly standard but keeping all of your status updates flowing through all your social networks can be somewhat tricky and time consuming. I previously wrote about twitterfeed which I use to send some of my updates from Flickr and SOMEWHAT FRANK directly to Twitter. I also wrote about Matt which helps to post single status updates to multiple twitter accounts. But I just found out about a new way to leverage AIM instant messenger to set my status on Twitter.
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May 22, 2008
With my busy schedule and lots of commitments I find reading books these days a challenge. DailyLit realizes this and has launched a product looking to help make it easier. DailyLit delivers books in managable installments via e-mail or RSS feed. DailyLit delivers your book updates everyday in chucks that only take a few minutes (2 to 5 minutes) and then move on with your day making possible to actually make progress on reading a book. DailyLit offers over 750 classics and a number of other books. Books range from anywhere from free to $9.95.
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May 3, 2008
The United States is ultimately a startup so I thought that is might be fun to take advantage of living near the nations capitol and show off the main office of the executive branch - the White House. I was able to capture some of the sites and sounds of the White House as part of the spring tour which I found out about through their own use of technology via the White House RSS feeds and podcasts.
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March 12, 2008
Alltop, a new startup creation founded by Guy Kawasaki, just announced a simple landing page product for those looking for the top feeds for a number of different vertical categories. Taking inspiration from popurls which aggregates the top urls on the Web, Alltop offers pages filled with feeds on a various topics.
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February 28, 2008
If you are a motorcycle or political enthusiast than listen up because you are going to like this. LOUD3R, a network for niche enthusiast offerings, has launched a couple of different aggregation sites. FAST3R the motorcycle site and VOT3R the political site are pulled together by leveraging a semantic publishing engine used in combination with natural language processing and human intelligence the engine selects and publishes the best and most interesting content to the network. Users can also contribute content and comments to the site.
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February 13, 2008
Techmeme, the popular news aggregator, just released a new feature today which will allow anyone to keep up with the news as it flows into Techmeme called the Firehose. In the past Techmeme has only released feeds for items that were above the fold on the site (maybe 20 to 30 most popular items from a day). With firehose, Techmeme and all its vertical brands, WeSmirch for celebrity gossip, ballbug for baseball news and memeorandum for political news, will offer a constant stream of news from every headline and discussion link that ever appears on the site. As explained by Gabe Rivera on his blog:
"Any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which exclude "Discussion" links) will appear in the feed within 5 minutes. This means well over 100 headlines per day for Techmeme Firehose, so casual news readers will want to use the Main feed (i.e. the previous, standard feed) instead."
Gabe has also put the firehose to Twitter so you can monitor the pulse of news on the go and as it comes in. This is great news for the tech, celebrity, baseball or politic news obsessed! TechCrunch also has more on the new Techmeme stream.
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February 4, 2008
FeedHub, the Pittsburgh-based startup created by mSpoke, has just announced an update aimed at improving the relevancy of its personalized feed creator. I covered FeedHub when they launched back in September 2007, since then they have received a lot of user feedback which they used to plan and execute on this latest update.
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December 10, 2007
Managing information overload can be a bit of a task these days with all the blogs, feeds and other content options out there on the Web and filling up my feed reader. How can a user better navigate to the items that might interest them the most? This is a tough problem to solve as every users is different. AideRSS is trying to solve this problem by helping to filter out the noise to deliver only the content that matters to the most.
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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 24, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Video Selection: My old friend Benjamin Higginbotham at Technology Evangelist gives an honest and 'somewhat frank' perspective about his first 12 hours with the just released the wireless book reading device the the Amazon Kindle. Ben is a veteran e-Book reader users and lists the positives and negatives to the Kindle.
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October 31, 2007
If you don't understand the value of Twitter you might want to listen now. I was just on Twitter checking some friend updates when I saw one of my Twitter friends yelled, "EARTHQUAKE!" The earthquake hit just outside of San Jose but thanks to Twitter I had personalized alerts from several friends in the area as soon as the quake hit.
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October 27, 2007
I spoke a few weeks ago at the Widget Summit in San Francisco on a panel dedicated to discussing the personal homepage space. The session was an hour long discussion with a cast of industry experts. I had a chance to get ahold of a video clip of my introduction. Additional footage will be coming out soon but I wanted to preview this video introducing myAOL to the Widget Summit crowd.
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October 8, 2007
Naymz, a web profile aggregator that I highlighted previously, offers some interesting reputation metrics services. While you could setup web alerts via a number of services Naymz aggregates these services into one dashboard.
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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 24, 2007
Having problems getting through all of your feeds in your reading list? Keeping up with the latest news from all the various publications can sometimes be as difficult as keeping up with your email where "email bankruptcy" runs rampant. FeedHub, a product of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke, has launched its personalized feed and recommendation product at the DEMO Conference. FeedHub creates a personalized RSS feed from you reading list and intelligently displays the most relevant post.
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September 16, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending September 16, 2007.
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September 3, 2007
The new AOL Mail has made quite a transformation since its beta launch in March as it continued to add features until it officially launched last week. The new AOL Mail product is very feature rich, Ajax email application with a nice interface.
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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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September 2, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending September 2, 2007.
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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 13, 2007
iTunes has been offering personalized recommendations within the iTunes application for quite sometime and I have found them to be very accurate and helpful. I have often discovered new songs that I like within the recommendations and downloading them quickly for instant gratification. iTunes has started to role out syndication of personalized music data as My iTunes Widgets, making it easy to share your music interests.
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August 12, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 12, 2007.
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August 9, 2007
Global Grind, currently in private alpha, is a New York-based web 2.0 personalized home page startup that is said to be focused on the "hip hop" generation. Being a "hip hop" listener I was curious to see what this intriguing value proposition was all about. Driven by curiosity, which was said to have killed the cat, I was expecting Global Grind personalized home page to bounce with a Jay-Z hip hop beat or something. That was not the case, Global Grind is a personal home page product with parity with a number of personalized home page products on the market (i.e. widgets, drag and drop, etc). I thought that some of its design element decisions and button placements were a little odd.
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July 29, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of bub.blicio.us at the TechCrunch event in Menlo Park, California on Friday evening (Suits Suck tee shirt photo explained in first story below). Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.29.07 TechCrunch 9 & A Funny "Suit"? I was in attendance for...
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July 27, 2007
RSS Mixer is a simple application for mixing multiple RSS feeds together into one feed. Interestingly, you can then take the new feed and output a custom feed for your iPhone, an Apple Widget, snaggable widget or feed reader. I created a feed mashup for TECH cocktail and Somewhat Frank...
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July 10, 2007
Today myAOL, a personalization product suite, has officially been released to the beta. As the myAOL Product Manager, I feel like our team just gave birth to triplets, as myAOL offers up three applications into one integrated dashboard experience with various levels of personalization. We hope you like it. I...
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July 3, 2007
FeedBurner, the Chicago-based feed management startup that was recently acquired by Google, has decided to offer its Pro services for free. Users can now get all the Pro stats and services for free. FeedBurner's official announcement was posted earlier this morning calling itself "FreeBurner." I assume the shift to free...
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June 19, 2007
So you want to organize all your stuff on the web in one place? A new myAOL is coming soon. The current myAOL is solely a feed reader that offers some recommendations. The new myAOL offers a personalized homepage experience with some additional bells and whistles. Aside from an Ajax...
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June 10, 2007
Photo of the Week: Space Shuttle Atlantis Launch from Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom by Josh Hallett was taken this week with the successful launch of the space shuttle. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 06.10.07 Major Relaunch For Ask: Ask3D It looks very sharp. I like the way they allow users...
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June 3, 2007
Photo of the Week: Need for Speed, taken by Marina Campos Vinhal expresses how I have felt, as the last three months have been a blur with days, weeks & months flying by with all the conferences, travel and work. I woke up the other day thinking, what just happened?...
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May 27, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by James Yu at Pier 38 in San Francisco on Thursday night (May 24, 2007) as part of the NewTeeVee and MetaCafe Pier Screenings. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.27.07 Facebook Moving to An Open Platform Strategy Facebook has announced a new strategy...
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May 22, 2007
Rootly, a news aggregator site, has relaunched with new site design and additional features. With the help of Marshall Kirkpatrick who has been guiding Rootly looks much improved. It now looks like a news start-page. The new and improved Rootly offers highly customizable RSS feed powered vertical news search based...
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May 20, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of a video camera recording Sarah Meyers interviewing someone at the May 2007 Girls in Tech in SF. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.20.07 Watch TV Stations From Your Web Browser More and more services are popping enabling users to...
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May 19, 2007
Is it just me or is Gabe Rivera turning up everywhere this week? It appears Gabe Rivera, the creator of techmeme and other news aggregator sites, had a very big week. I know Gabe is very modest, but I think the Mims song "This Is Why I'm Hot" might be...
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May 13, 2007
Photo of the Week: While in Santa Monica, California this week for Twiistup I decided to get up early on Wednesday to go down to the beach and snap this shot. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits 05.13.07 Facebook to Launch Classifieds Service Social network Facebook is set to launch a classified...
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May 11, 2007
Trying to figure out how to get a poll on your blog, myspace page, or other website? Your search is over. PollDaddy is a great resource for quickly generating a poll to put practically anywhere on the web. PollDaddy is both flexible and free and it can be easily embedded...
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April 28, 2007
Though many leverage syndication everyday, feed reading is not an activity done by everyone. Many people don't even know what the initials RSS stand for. Common Craft recognized this disconnect and decided to try and start educating the masses with a video titled, RSS in Plain English (shown below). Click...
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April 8, 2007
Photo of the week: robobunny by Courtney Brooke. Happy Easter. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.08.07 DRM-Free Music EMI announced DRM-free music earlier in the week and now Microsoft is hinting at doing the same. Is this the death of DRM? 500 million+!!! AOL'Sphere Goes Live AOL and Sphere quietly turned...
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April 7, 2007
End of the web's free ride? Doubtful. As a former Tribune Co. employee it was surprising to see the Washington Post article published today (April 7, 2007) saying that, soon-to-be Tribune Co. owner and real estate billionaire, Samuel Zell was set on trying to make news aggregators pay for newspaper.com...
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March 11, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo of a robot titled bleeplaps by Eric Skiff was taken at SXSW which is going on this weekend in Austin, Texas. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.11.07 My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover Just as Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel hinted at last week, the new...
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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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March 4, 2007
Photo of the Week: It was a rather crazy peculiar week so I went searching for answers in photographs and found this photo titled very strange moon tonight by Ordinary Guy. It captures the lunar eclipse that occurred on March 3, 2007. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.04.07 The Attention Economy:...
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February 25, 2007
Photo of the week: With the 79th Academy Awards tonight I felt this photo title Over Hollywood Sign by Jorge Mir offered a good point of perspective. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.25.07 Hollywood Disrupted By Social Media? An opinion piece in the LA Times, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”,...
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February 23, 2007
FeedBurner released a feed market analysis report yesterday (February 22, 2007) which offers an unprecedented look into the syndication industry. This is the most comprehensive feed report of its kind to date. According to the report, Google, MyYahoo and Bloglines currently offer the most popular web-based feed aggregator products. It...
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February 18, 2007
Photo of the week: Create a 2 gigabyte ChapStick as explained by The Machinist. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.18.07 Patent Monkey: Yahoo Ready to Smash Up the Mash Ups Yahoo was recently granted a patent that could cause a bit of a shake-up to other web portal companies if acted...
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February 9, 2007
Yahoo Pipes launched in beta yesterday (February 8, 2007) as a dashboard for remixing existing RSS feeds. Pipes provides a very geek-centric yet compelling application, as it empowers any user to create a custom feed. Though this product might seem simple to people within the web 2.0 industry or the...