SOMEWHAT FRANK

Pluck Shadows Community Search Beta No More

Pluck first introduced the community tagging and blog search engine called Shadows as a Beta in mid-July. It offers a simple way for bloggers to tag their posts rather then actually adding tag code to your posts. It also offers other collaborative capabilities which include joining web groups and discussions. Additionally, Shadows offers a blog tag search feature which can be sorted by users, groups, and listings you specifically tagged.

I first blogged about Shadows back in July in the Somewhat Frank post IceRocket and Pluck Shadows Tagging as it was offered as a Beta. Today Pluck announced Shadows 1.0 is no longer in the Beta phase in the latest Pluck Press Release.  Check out Shadows and give it a try. It has a lot to offer to bloggers and non-bloggers alike.

Sphere Offers A Better Blog Search?

I recently read about Sphere the soon to be released blog search in a post by Rob Hof of the BusinessWeek Tech Beat blog. I tried to get into the Beta group but was not able to at the present time but appear to be on the waiting list. I read more about Sphere on the Sphere About page and came away with these questions:

1.)    How does this new blog search going to work?
Is the search going to crawl the web or rely on pings from users? Sphere is supposed to work better then the current search engines and I am curious as to how this will be orchestrated to compete with IceRocket and Technorati and more recently Yahoo and Google. The about page talks of a relevancy based search as follows:

“Our new relevance-based algorithm discovers new blog posts as they're created, indexes them within minutes of being published, applies rich semantic analysis and makes them searchable by relevance or time.”

It will be interesting to see how that works.

2.) How will Sphere filter out spam?
It is mentioned in the About page but they do not go into detail. As co-manager of Splog Reporter, I am interested to see the efforts of other companies to combat spam blogs or splog.

3.) What other unique features does this new blog search have to offer? 
Obviously, the people behind Sphere know they have to compete with the big blog search engines and must have something unique to offer users. I cannot wait to see it in action.

Check out the blogosphere posts about Sphere on Web 2.0 Central, Jeremy Zawodny, Blogspotting, Changing Way, TechCrunch, and Tom Raftery's I.T. Views.

Has anyone else seen Sphere yet? If so, please comment on it. I would love to hear your feedback.

Email Management: Liberate Your Inbox

Is your email inbox so full you cannot find what you are looking for? My corporate Outlook account was, until just recently. Tribune Interactive's new Product Development Manager, Carlos Pero, recommended a paper he had read a few months prior about managing your email account. He mentioned it was on the 37 Signals weblog, so I did a quick archive search and found this article by Mark Hurst titled Managing Incoming Email: What Every User Needs To Know. I read through it and was able to clean up my inbox from over 1000 emails to just 2.   

Goodbye Sweet Georgia and Thank You

Over Georgia originally uploaded via camera-phone by Somewhat Frank.

I just flew home from Georgia and took this photo out the window of the airplane. It was a wonderful weekend away from Chicago. I spent time with some extraordinary people and really enjoyed myself. The weekend seemed to pass so fast it is quite obvious I was having fun.

A special thanks is in order to the hosts and everyone involved the trip for letting me share the moment. I would also like to send happy birthday wishes to Poppop who turned 90 years young this weekend entertained us with his music and still shot his age in golf on his birthday... simply unbelievable!

Sea Island Update

Beach Club originally uploaded via camera-phone by Somewhat Frank.

I made it to Sea Island, Georgia's Sea Island Resorts safely. The weather has been beautiful. I only have checked email once to receive feedback on a Tribune project I am currently managing. So I have definitely have gotten to relax. Though I have read the Wall Street Journal and NY Times everyday by the pool, where I read about the recent sale of iFilm to MTV and kept up with my sports teams via ESPN while lounging at the gorgeous beach club (shown above). I also caught some rays, swam some laps and got a wonderful massage at the spa from Melissa. She has strong hands! I also got to explain Splog Reporter and the effort to rid the blogosphere of spam blogs in a few conversations.

Unfortunately, I fly back later today. I should be just in time to eat a nice dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant and catch Family Guy the baseball playoffs and to get ready for the work grind tomorrow.

Georgia On My Mind

In less than three hours, I will be departing for Sea Island, Georgia for a weekend away from the big city. It is a much needed fall break after battling mono in September. I hope to catch some rays on the beach and get some much needed rest and relaxation. However, I also plan on mobile blogging some of accounts of my weekend trip via my recently acquired LG VX9800 cellular phone. I love this thing! It is equipped with a 1.3 mega-pixel camera so I can post images from the beach if I so desire. Not to mention it gets VCasts video clips, text and picture messaging, Internet web browsing and pretty much can do anything a Blackberry can do in regards to email.

I am looking forward to the sunshine and sea breeze. Today, I have got Georgia on my mind!

Video iPod: Finally Released

Just a month ago the iPod nano was released and loved for its size and innovation. Steve Jobs was interviewed about the product and the future of the iPod. He explained how watching video on an iPod is an active rather then passive activity while the iPod music player is a passive activity for music on the go which made many believe a video iPod was not in the cards. Now the video iPod has been released at an Apple event on Wednesday (10/12/05). The event coming while photos of the video iPod leaked out to the Internet.  Apple also unveiled the details of a TV deal with ABC to provide video content for the new player. Pixar (Steve Jobs other company) also is going to release short film releases which will be available on iTunes.

For more images of the new video iPod check out the iLounge.com Flickr gallery, also check out the blogosphere's buzz by checking out aaronlogy, HYPEBEAST, Attaboy, The Disney Blog, and marvbloke. Visit the Apple Store to purchase a new iPod for $299 or $399 depending on the storage specifics. Finally, check out this article on washingtonpost.com for a conventional media report on Apple's video iPod and new TV deal.

Yahoo Adds Blogs To Yahoo News

The line between professional and grassroots journalism continues to become more gray with the move by Yahoo yesterday (10/11/05) to include blog sources in its News results. With the official release of the Yahoo Blog Search, the News search results are now offering blog search results in the right rail. So there are still boundaries on the results page that help distinguish media and blog sources but the fact that they are now on the same page is a huge stride for bloggers. This integration is very interesting though, since it is another step closer to the general public acknowledging the blogosphere voice and strong influence with it's over 100 million blogs. While there is still opposition to bloggers being part of the definition of journalism as mentioned in this post on The Blog Herald. However, Buzzmachine contests that journalism is an act and not a person. So who is right?

I think it is a smart move by Yahoo to make the blogosphere more mainstream since I feel the blogosphere in many cases reports trends more quickly then the professional media. For example, last week the blogosphere buzzed about Ning the newly released social application platform. I am willing to bet not too many professional journalism outlets picked up the Ning release buzz that I blogged about on Somewhat Frank. That is just one recent example and there is probably one example like this every week in the blogosphere. So I think it is crucial that these sources be recognized for latest trends and news, so I applaud Yahoo's efforts.

For more blogosphere coverage of the move by Yahoo to add blogs to the news check out the posts on Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Search Engine Guide, Technoogle, Atul's Blog, and NewsBusters.org.

What Is Your Blog Worth?

The sale of Weblogs, Inc. last week to AOL is the first big deal of its kind thus there is speculation that it will act as a benchmark for value of blogs. Using the sale's numbers as a guide blogger Tristan Louis generated a calculation for determining a blogs value based on site linked to a blog in Technorati. Each link is considered to be worth $564. Tristan listed all of the Weblogs, Inc. blogs in his post on the TNL.net weblog.  Additionally, the Inside Google blog figured out the value of several well known blogs. Using the same calculation I determined the value of some of the blogs I frequently visit:

TechCrunch:  $394,800
Online Marketing Blog: $116,184
Syntagma:  $42,864
The Blog Herald: $853,896

To determine what your blog is worth visit Technorati and find out how many sites link to you. Then take that number and multiply it by $564. What Is Your Blog Worth? 

Google Reader Makes Finding Feeds Easy

Google Labs released Google Reader last week at the Web 2.0 conference and it was much talked about in the blogosphere. Google Reader is an RSS Reader that allows you many of the same tools that are offered by other RSS feed readers however also enables users to search by keyword for new feeds. Google Reader’s appearance is similar to the Personalized Google homepage functionality that allows you to pull in RSS feeds in the left rail.

I was unable to get to checking it out till yesterday a when I did I found the functionality to be in-line with the rest of the readers but offers several navigational niceties that allow you to arrange and view feeds differently. The biggest differentiating factor from other RSS reader is the search that Google Reader provides. It appeared very accurate in finding feeds via keyword search. The only downside I see as a blogger is that Google Reader uses a site’s atom.xml file to index the Google Reader search therefore it does not give a user the feed that a blogger may want a user to subscribe to. For example, if you set up a Feedburner feed for your blog, Google Reader’s search would not be able offer that Feedburner feed to users but rather offer a atom.xml feed that is found from crawling your blog. This will keep Google Reader subscribers from being counted by Feedburner's metrics package which makes the readership stats only a subset of your subscribers.

For more information on the Google Reader read this post on the Google blog. The Google Reader is getting mixed reviews from the blogosphere. To see for yourself check out doctorvee, Content Doctor, Twisted View, The Geek Guy Rants, Stormgrass, flipthedolphin and Eric Setiawan. Additionally, Holizz versus the Web has offered a Google Reader bookmarklet that allows you to add items to Google Reader more easily from your browser.

Yahoo Offers Podcasts

Yahoo has launched a Yahoo Podcasts beta today (10/10/05) that offers users podcast services to springboard Yahoo into the podcasting arena. The services are free and makes it easier for users to look through a number of podcasts with a Yahoo podcast search.  Geoff Ralston, Yahoo's chief product officer stated:

"We intend to be the most comprehensive source for podcast content…”

This move by Yahoo will compete with services like Odeo in offering podcasts and podcast search features. According to a washingtonpost.com report, Yahoo estimates that up to 5 million people currently listen to podcasts on a number of niche topics. Yahoo plans to offer the best services to allow people to find the podcasts they are looking for. However, unlike Odeo, Yahoo currently does not offer any tools for creating podcasts though they may plan on doing that soon.

To check out Yahoo’s Podcasts beta visit: http://podcasts.yahoo.com
To find out the buzz in the blogosphere about Yahoo’s initial podcasting offerings check out NickStarr.com, Micro Persuasion, Technoogle, The Trend Junkie,  Online, and Agregador de goikoetxeta.com.

Road Trip To Purdue

Purdue endzone originally uploaded via cameraphone by Somewhat Frank.

As a Purdue University alum I took a road trip down to watch Purdue's football team take on Iowa. While the trip was enjoyable the actual game was painful to watch as Purdue dropped their third straight game. It is quite obvious to me that it is going to be a long season for the Boilermakers. However, the Big Ten conference is filled with parody. It was most likely a historic day with Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin and Purdue all losing on the same Saturday. When was the last time that happened? My other Alma mater, Northwestern beat Wisconsin which completed the list of upsets. This leaves Penn State as the clear favorite in the Big Ten but Michigan State is also looking tough. You have got to love college football, especially in the Big Ten.

Visiting The Chicago Lighthouse

Welcome Tribune Interactive posted via cameraphone by Somewhat Frank.

I recently visited the Chicago Light House with Tribune Interactive as part of the United Way Leadership breakfast. The Chicago Lighthouse helps the visually impaired with support, career help and schooling. They also have a 30 employee clock making business that is run by the blind. It was amazing to see the assembly line. It was a very eye opening visit and made me feel good in supporting the United Way.

Delaware Ruling Protects Anonymous Blogger's Freedom Of Speech

A ruling in favor of an anonymous blogger in Delaware will help to build case law to further protecting the freedom of speech. The ruling reversed a defamatory case Smyrna town councilman Patrick Cahill filed against bloggers from the by Independent Newspapers Inc., publisher of the Delaware State News. According to an AP report posted on First Amendment Center News the Delaware case:

"...the Delaware Supreme Court yesterday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official."

How does this affect the blogosphere?  Bloggers who anonymously post can now rest assured and continue ranting on any topic that they see fit with less fear of the legal ramifications. I am not saying go out and post defamatory remarks about someone and you are in the clear if you post them anonymously. Since this ruling is one of the only rulings of its kind there are questions as to if it will hold up across state lines. However, Delaware law may be respected enough that it may help protect anonymous bloggers across the country. It is definitely a ruling in favor of our first amendment right. 

To read the entire opinion check out John Doe 1 vs. Cahill.  Also get the blogosphere's perspective by reading the posts on Pocosin, Diane's Stuff, Slowlink, Rebuilding Media, and Contains 33% Juice. The washingtonpost.com also covered the ruling.

Weblogs Inc. Sold To AOL

Weblogs Inc., a blog network run by Jason Calacanis and funded by VC's such as Mark Cuban, was sold to AOL today (October 6, 2005) for what Wired.com reported as $25 million dollars. This might be a wake up call to all those in doubt of the ability to establish a business based on weblogs and generate revenue. We now have a new formula that has been proven:

Successful Blog Network = Potential Big $

Check out what Jason Calacanis had to say on his blog. Find out the blogosphere's take on the big sale by going to posts on Niall Kennedy's Weblog, Blogads weblog, Micro Persuasion, The Trend Junkie, Net, Blogspotting, PaidContent.org, and Building My Empire. Additionally, check out this recap on the washingtonpost.com.