SOMEWHAT FRANK

Megite Gets Personal

Megite, the online news aggregator site created by Matthew Chen, tracks and reports what is happening right in several different vertical categories. The categories include:

• Technology
• Politics
• Business
• Gossip
• Entertainment
• Sports
• Health
• Deals
• Chinese

Megite is now creating a personalized aggregator vertical called My Megite by allowing power users to submit their reading list in an OPML format. The result is a real-time personalized news tracker based on all of the feeds that you normally search through. This feature is similar to using Technorati’s recently added “Favorites” feature but does not cap the number of feeds you can pull in at 50. I sent my OPML file to Matthew and he set up My Megite here: Frank Gruber

I like what Matthew has done to personalize the Megite experience. I appreciate his help in setting up My Megite. The product has already evolve significantly since I first encountered it and I expect it to continue since it is such a competitive space. One thing I would love to see is the ability to continue to add feeds to your My Megite area as you encounter them thus keeping the reading list up to date.

For the most updated information on Megite check out its blog.

Google Snags SketchUp With 3D Dreams

Google continued to vacuum the start-up landscape by acquiring @LastSoftware, creator of SketchUp, today (March 14, 2006). SketchUp is an award winning software that makes creating 3D designs easy. The acquisition offers users a free online platform for users to draw in 3D and Google has made the software available for free trial here.

After further investigation it became more clear that Google could plan to use the software to beef up Google Earth with these same types of 3D images (i.e. buildings and landmarks) which could produce additional advertising real estate.

Web 2.0 Compliant?

How do you know if a web site or company is part of the web 2.0 movement?  If you are not sure or just curious to find out whether a site is embracing the web 2.0 movement visit Certifyr. After supplying a URL and answering a few simple questions regarding the characteristics of the site or company, Certifyr will spit out a percent of compliance to the web 2.0 standards. Here are a few sites I looked up:

Flickr = 88% Web 2.0 Compliant
Edgeio = 75% Web 2.0 Compliant
FeedBurner = 69% Web 2.0 Compliant

The Certifyr web 2.0 algorithm is more for amusement than anything else. Have some web 2.0 motivated fun by running a few site through Certifyr to see how web 2.0 compliant they are.

FeedBurner Opens West Coast Digs

FeedBurner, the Chicago based feed management company, is showing some "California love" as they have decided to set up shop in San Francisco to help facilitate additional strategic alliances and partnerships. FeedBurner has hired Don Loeb, former director of business development for Yahoo!’s Network Products business unit, as the new Vice President of Business Development, Strategic Partnerships. According to Niall Kennedy who is out in the San Francisco area, FeedBurner’s new office will most likely be in the same office space as Adaptive Path.

It appears FeedBurner will still be headquartered in Chicago where they have been doing a great job connecting with publishers across the globe. The San Francisco expansion will help anchor and manage FeedBurner's Silicon Valley presence.

For Don Loeb's perspective on leaving Yahoo check out this post on his blog.

*San Francisco skyline image thanks to htmlhelp.com

Memeorandum Now Tracks Celebrity News

Memeorandum, the aggregator site created by Gabe Rivera that tracks the most recent and prominent happenings on the web in technology and political news, has added celebrity and entertainment news to the list with WeSmirch. According to this post on the memeorandum blog the name WeSmirch was chosen for two reasons:

"First, smirch is a perfectly good verb.  And second, because celebritygossip.memeorandum.com is just too awesome a name for the world to handle at this time."

I agree, with WeSmirch tracking celebrity gossip real-time gossip followers are going to have a lot of free time on their hands. One other note on memeorandum, I noticed that all meme verticals are now displaying images along side articles and posts which is a nice added feature.

Craig Newmark SXSW Keynote Recap

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com, was interviewed by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, for the keynote today (March 13, 2006) at the South By Southwest Conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.

Due to the timing of the sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy, Craig was questioned if he felt somewhat responsible for Knight Ridder's sale due to Craigslist's plummeting of the bay area print classified advertising revenue model. Could Craig's keynote have come at a more perfect time? 

For easy-to-follow bullet points from the keynote check out this post by Will Pate. For a more in-depth recap visit Unbeige as they go on to explain a  design session where Craigslist is given a design makeover producing, Craigslist2.0. Auscillate also posted highlights in a Q&A format. I looked for a podcast of the keynote and could not find one but do expect one to surface soon. If you are craving a Craig Newmark podcast now you might want to tide your appetite by checking out this Craig Newmark podcast interview recorded just 8 days ago (March 5, 2006).

*Craig Newmark photo thanks to Steve Mac.

Google Book Sale?

Google appears to be moving into merchandising by offering authors to sell their books in an online version through Google. Details of the program can be found here. John Battelle highlights the program and welcomes Google into merchandising. It appears Google is slowly moving into e-commerce and could potentially aim to compete with Amazon.com in the space which could be intriguing to watch materialize.

WordPress.com Improves With Widgets

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 the latest WordPress.com update which explains some the new widgets. Some of the widgets allow you to include:

• RSS or Atom feeds
• recent blog posts
• recent comments
• text
  
• del.icio.us bookmarks

Lorelle on WordPress has created an easy to follow tutorial post if you are interested in using the new sidebar widgets on a WordPress.com blog.

I think this a great move by WordPress.com as they continue to improve the free blog platform and allow for additional customization strengthen its offerings. It is improves such as sidebar widgets which will continue to close the gap between WordPress and pay blog platforms like Six Apart's Typepad.

Explore The Solar System With Google

Google has shown us satellite imagery from Earth and even the Moon, but now it appears Google is offering maps of other planets, in this case Mars. Visit Google Mars and you will see a colorful crater filled surface (as shown below).

Googling Google details the mapping features of Google Mars and the Googlist also reported that Google has also registered a number of other planet related domains like GoogleMercury.com, GoogleVenus.com and so on. So it appears Google has plans to show additional planets as NASA produces the imagery to display.

UPDATE: Google has made a post in reference to Google Mars on the Google Blog.

Technology Evangelist 'The Innovators' Series Visits Somewhat Frank

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 chatting with Ro Marth and Ed Kohler in a popular Chicago restaurant and bar just off of Michigan Avenue. We discussed blogging and I gave some tips for anyone that may be thinking about diving into the blogosphere by starting up a blog. In the video I mention a slide presentation on setting up a blog which is a 13 slide presentations below.

Steps to Getting Started In the Blogosphere - Part 1: Settng up a blog   PDF file

It was a pleasure meeting with the Technology Evangelist team.  I hope you enjoy the show.

Firefox Browser Pimped With Extensions

Ever wonder what would happen if you added 1o0 of the most popular Firefox extensions to your browser? I did. However I recently found this post on Splasho which took 100 of the most popular Firefox extensions and installed them all at one time. Here is what is would look like (screen-shot below).

Yes, that is a pretty ugly sea of toolbars. How would the browser's stability be affected? According to Splasho:

"Overall I was very impressed. The browser was a little slow on my machine (which doesn’t have impressive specs) but there were no crashes except when installing the extensions."

Wow, that is surprisingly impressive. 

Hngry Launches: It's Time To Eat

Ever have problems deciding where to go out to eat? Hngry, a dining suggestion engine, launched today and may be able to help you out.  According to the founder of hngry, who remains somewhat anonymous:

"Hngry was built to solve a problem that I and my girlfriend have… not being able to figure out where to eat, especially when we’re already hungry. I figured that a lot of other people had the same problem, so here hngry is."

The site asks you to sign-in and pull together your favorite menus from local restaurants and enter them into hngry. The site then asks you questions as to what type of food you would like to eat and then spits out dining suggestions.

I have been waiting a couple of weeks for hngry to launch. I figured it would be food related but was not sure on the details quite yet. In creating an account and logging I found hngry to present couple of very simple functions. A users enters data on a restaurant and then has access to that data online to such on later for dining suggestions. I think it is a good idea and runs very much in parallel to TeamSportsBars.com a Ning application I launched a few weeks ago. The difference between the two sites though is that TeamSportsBars.com is focused solely on finding a place to cheer on your favor sports team that teams' local hangout and hngry offers dining suggestions. In my experiences with TeamSportsBars.com I have found that it can be difficult to get users to sign up and contribute. I could see hngry encountering the same hurdle. For example, I just search my condo for a local restaurant menu to enter in the information and it is currently the only restaurant that is available to suggest so it will take some time to build up the data.

In hindsight, with both hngry may have wanted to shopped the idea around to a few bloggers to beta test so that there was more data available prior to the launch today (March 11, 2006). I did this but still had data entry buy-in issues. I think hngry could be useful if users entered enough data but in the meantime, I would suggest hngry look into getting data dumps of some basic Yellow Page data for several of the larger cities. Users could then be offered some suggested restaurants to choose from and add to their dining portfolio. According to the hngry blog there are plans in the works to offer a bookmarklet to enable easier restaurant entry. So that could help with building up the data. Additionally, I think that hngry could benefit by adding and leveraging some other web 2.0 elements, like syndication feeds among other things.

Google Scares Me!

With the recent leak of Google Calendar images onto TechCrunch, the speculation of GDrive and the indexing of the personal desktop via Google Desktop, all I can say is:

Google scares me!

Google appears to be out to own everyone's information whether it be cellphone conversations, emails, documents on your PC and most recently your schedule of events via Google calendar.

Does this bother anyone else?

Google has everything that is necessary to totally invade my privacy. It is the classic case of "big brother" that could alter our behavior, which in part invades our freedom. Like most of the general public, I like Google. It is to the point where my girlfriend calls me a" Google-phile" because I converse about them so often in the blogosphere, verbally and sometimes even while in my sleep. I even have a Google fleece throw that is quite honestly one of the nicest fleece blankets I have ever seen, which only further reinforces my liking for Google. However, Google's transparent and somewhat arrogant public relations approach has created a disconnect and its actions are speaking louder than its words.

What is Google doing to help ease the disconnect?

Google has executed a lousy public relations strategy. On the Google blog this week -- the same week that dropped both the speculation of a GDrive and Google Calendar -- the posts highlighted pugs and the Google News expansion. I think pugs are cute dogs and could act as a distraction, but it seems like a total avoidance of the week's happenings. I am afraid this type of avoidance could hurt Google in the long run. I am already hearing the whisper campaigns of a "Google is evil!" drawing parallel to similar campaigns towards Microsoft five or six years ago. I would hope that Google was able to learn from Microsoft and that the company will address these rumors now in the blogosphere where the conversations begin. Have a conversation with a blogger. Show them that Google is not too high and mighty for conversation with a lowly grassroots journalist with a love for cool products and the scope. The real irony here is that Google's simple rule of thumb has been:

"Don't be evil."

I would advise you to listen to Steve Gillmor's Daily Show as he talks with Mike Arrington of TechCrunch about Google. Mike shows some love for Microsoft for the way that they have been embracing the blogosphere and calls Google evil. I do not think Google is evil but do share similar fears to Mike in regard to Google's plans to invade our privacy and potentially our freedom. If Google would just take a more apparent approach to educating the general public on the ins and outs of its products and ultimately its intentions for all of my personal information, the whispers would most likely be quelled.

Origami: For The Paper Birds?

I used to make origami cranes in grade school similar to the one shown. The blogosphere has been buzzing about origami in the last week or so you would have thought a herd of crazed paper cranes armed with the bird flu were pulling bloggers from the comfort of their homes. Thankfully, origami cranes are not attacking and the blogosphere has been buzzing about a new ultra-mobile PC called Origami that Microsoft has been trying to gracefully leak into the conversations of the blogosphere . I say gracefully because I really do not know how else you could drop origami into a conversation totally unrelated to paper crane construction.

I have yet to jump on the Origami bandwagon but decided to finally break my silent because there are finally official images behind all the buzz and speculation. Microsoft's Channel 9 video blog has posted this Origami clip and Microsoft's website has this new page devoted to the ultra-mobile PC or UMPC.

Robert Scoble is wondering if all the hype about Origami was warranted. I am wondering the same thing since Origami is a small table PC which is not anything new. Though, I maintain an open mind and would be interested in testing an Origami out to see how it fits my lifestyle. I wonder if it could replace my currently laptop computer which is already ultra-portable but has a full keyboard.

Yahoo Gallery: Applications On Exhibit

Applications that use a Yahoo API have a new trophy case as Yahoo has created a new site called Yahoo Gallery. Through the site you create a developer profile and submit your Yahoo application for others to see, rate, download and tag. The site also showcases some of the more popular Yahoo based applications. These applications could be mashups like the maps and video mashup called Sampling Life in SF via Random Videos (screen-shot below) or applications like Rollyo which allows you to roll your own search using the Yahoo Search API.

I think this is a great project to draw attention to the Yahoo Developers Network which at the eTech Conference announced the opening of additional APIs (Yahoo Photos, Calendar, MyWeb, and Shopping) to developers by highlighting the available Yahoo API’s and showcase creative developers for their novel creations.