SOMEWHAT FRANK

Blog Tag: Five Things About Me(me)

Eric Olson, TECH cocktail co-founder and friend, and online marketing guru Lee Odden both tagged me recently to participate in a holiday version of blog tag. According to Lee's post:

"Jeff Pulver started things off with this Holiday version of Blog Tag and this is the way it works: Once you’re tagged by another blogger, you write five things most people don’t know about you and then “tag” five other bloggers."

Though it’s a little off topic for Somewhat Frank I think it falls under the web life category and I respect Eric, Lee and Jeff  so I took a crack at it.

Five Things You May Not Know About Me:

1. I was once pulled on stage while watching a taping of the The Tonight Show with Jay Leno because I forgot to put my cell phone on mute and it went off while Jay was doing his thing. As a result, I got brought up on stage and asked to dance while a few women from the audience stripped my shirt off in front of the entire audience which included my grandmother, Aunt and sister.
2. I used AOL to go online for the first time. I remember my younger brother and I surfed the web for hours and were made well aware of the impact of our surfing when the phone bill arrived and we were found to be dialing into a long distance number for dial-up service. Oops!
3. I found out earlier this year that while vacationing in Cancun I partied with Paris Hilton. I had no idea until this photo surfaced.
4. I have sailed across Lake Michigan with my dad and brother in-law.
5. I am the Frank J. Gruber the fifth or V if you want to go by the roman numeral. Yes, I come from a long line of Frank’s. The name of this blog, Somewhat Frank, has the more obvious candid meaning but secondarily is based off the fact that I am the fifth and grew up being called by my initials, F.J. – so in essence, I am truly somewhat Frank.

The rules say that I now have to challenge five others. I know it probably off topic for some but think of it as a quick vacation post from your normal blogging routine: Brian Oberkirch, Jeremiah Owyang, Veronica Belmont, Orli Yakuel and Mike Arrington - you're it!

FeedBurner Opens Door To Site Stats

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 and site link referrals
  
• Outbound links and counts
  
• City Cloud map of visitors (but alas, no Cloud City)

This means that a site owner can add one piece of code to their site to track metrics on the site level. The code also can produce FeedFlare and serve ads. Below is a screen-shot which I pulled from the FeedBurner blog of what the site metrics dashboard offered by FeedBurner.

I will be interested in testing it out to see if this new site code will at all slow the site load times. Regardless, it gives the ability to see the entire metrics picture through both solid FeedBurner feed metrics and now site metrics. Brilliant!

UPDATE: Orli Yakuel offers more perspective here.

Feed Reader Dreaming

I recently highlighted current consumer feed reading habits but it's been awhile now since I authored the feed readers comparison for TechCrunch.  The landscape has changed as products have released new features while other products have ducked out of the competition. SplashCast recently did a market analysis to produce an extensive list of feed reader options. The article, written by former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, starts by focusing on  feed readers handling of rich media RSS, provides insight into his top 10 favorite feed readers and concludes by California feed reader dreaming with the idea of his "dream feed reader" as follows:

"If I could piece together the various options available to me now, what I’d like is this. I’d like an online reader with the speed and media handling of Google Reader and the river of news functionality of Newsgator Online. I’d like it synced with a desktop reader that combines the stability, 3rd party tagging and river of news of NetNewsWire with the aesthetics of FeedDemon and the media handling of RSSOwl. I don’t believe that anyone has yet nailed the cross platform mobile reader that syncs with web and desktop readers. That’s subject of another post, though."

I would have to agree that all these features combined would be great but if I had to prioritize them I would say application speed/performance, organizational design elements (i.e. tagging, labels or folders) and discover tools (i.e. a recommendations engine for feeds or feed items to help me to get to the items that might interest me the most) would top my list.

With Skype 3.0: No More Free Calling :(

Apparently there is no such thing as a free lunch as Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, which has offered unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada since last Spring. Skype is planning on charging an annual $30 fee for those same calls starting January 1, 2007 according to a recent NYTimes report. The report went on to say:

"The new annual fee for unlimited calling, while still nominal compared with other Internet calling plans, is part of a broader strategy by eBay to expand Skype’s product offerings and revenue."

I do not know how much $30 a year will affect people's decision to continue to use Skype since Skype is still going to be very inexpensive to the user. Personally, I probably will continue to use the Skype service or just limit myself to Skype to Skype calls. In a highly competitive web 2.0 world this could open the door for other services to take on Skype's current "free" calling model to differentiate itself from Skype when they do switch to a paid model. Interestingly, AOL offers a similar VOIP service to Skype called AIM Phoneline and also charges a fee for unlimited calling just like Skype's plans. It will be amusing to see if new services spring up with the free calling model. 

Compete Confronts Alexa Head On

Are you a web metrics junkie? If so you probably have been using Alexa to access public site rankings and metrics. Alexa now has a legitimate contender in the space in Compete, a subsidiary of the online market research firm CompeteInc, as they recently decided to change their game-plan by allowing a comparable public metrics site.

So which is better Alexa or Compete? I have been planning an article to compare the two services since I had a chance to chat with some of the Compete team at TechCrunch 8. I was impressed by their recent move to offer a handful of consumer products. Compete offers a toolbar which tracks your clicks on the Internet and thus as a reward offers deals related to the various sites visited. Compete has a unique search engine which taps into Compete's five years of  metrics data to list Compete Picks above regular search results. Finally, Compete SnapShot is the product that takes on Alexa head on. To see it in action check out the the comparison of two popular domains below.

Ironically, Compete recently beat me to the punch to tackle the Compete vs. Alexa debate itself. 

ReviewMe: My First 30 Days of Use

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 sent me four different review requests. I was given 72 hours to accept each offer. I briefly checked out each service and decided not to review any of the products.

Why did I decline an easy $475 or $125 per post? It is simple. The products did not excite me. As Seth Godin puts it, they were not Purple Cows. Not to say that every product or blog post I highlight is a ‘purple cow’ but these did not arouse my interest. It isn’t that these companies aren’t doing valuable things online, they just didn’t catch my attention. After receiving these review requests it is very clear to me that ReviewMe puts bloggers into a somewhat compromised situation since ReviewMe bloggers could be perceived in the blogosphere:

1.)    As a sellout if they write a positive review and get paid for it.
2.)    As a pompous egotistical bastard if they write a negative review and get paid for it.

ReviewMe presents a tough nut to crack and thus far I have chosen to abstain until the right review opportunity happens to arise, but I would love to hear about other bloggers experiences with the product.

Photo Attribution: sunclover via Flickr

Mobot First Mobile Visual Search Engine

Have you ever seen something in a store or while reading a magazine that you want to remember so you take a photo of it with your cellphone camera?

Mobot is a startup that plans to leverage this type of mobile phone behavior to offer an innovative service. Mobot is the first ever mobile visual search. Similar to online visual searches Like.com a byproduct of Riya, Mobot searches for items based on an image that is taken with with a mobile device. It appears that Mobot has partnerships with certain products and services and thus when you submit an image Mobot serves up relevant products and services. Without actually being able to test the service it is difficult to determine the relevance and accuracy of the search functionality. However, it appears that most U.S. cellular carriers will carry Mobot so I should be able to test it when it does actually become available.

Additional details are sure to come once Mobot makes its move to market but in the meantime check out more information on Mobot technology.

Bottom-line: Mobot is the first mobile visual search which could be a helpful service as long as it doesn't go overboard with promotional results but delivers accurate and relevant search results.

innerTee T-Shirt Design and Creation Community Publicly Launches

innerTee, an Austin, Texas based startup, came of out private beta this week to publicly launch a social network for custom t-shirt design and creation. Community members can create their own custom t-shirt from a selection of designer contributed artwork. innerTee offers an interesting opportunity for designers that contribute artwork to get paid for the usage of their contributed artwork.

The interface used to create a tee shirt is simple to use and is referred to as "mixing" a tee. Once you have mixed a garment to your liking you can purchase it online. You can also share the design with everyone in the community, embed it into a webpage or send it along via email.

I created a quick design that can be accessed by the rest of the community to buy or re-mix (click the button below to see the design or look at the screen-shot above). Users can leave feedback in the form of comments under each design. Additionally, the site offers forums for designers, artists and t-shirt shoppers to further interact.

innerTee offers a place for t-shirt addicts to go creatively wild taking the idea of community submitted garments, that Chicago-based Threadless has banked on for a few years, to the next level. For more information on innerTee check out the innerTee blog.

Bottom-line: innerTee is an interesting new social site for personalized garment creation that came out of private beta this week. I like the fact that designers can contribute and profit from their work within the community. My only real negative thought about innerTee is that the pricing seems to be a little bit inflated. We will see if it catches on and innerTee cashes in.

TECH cocktail 3: Coming In Early 2007

Start 2007 off on the right foot by attending TECH cocktail 3 on Thursday, January 25, 2007 from 6:30 to 9pm at Amira in Chicago. Amira is located at the base of the NBC Tower close to the Chicago River and Michigan Avenue. Co-founder Eric Olson and I are pretty psyched about the venue so we hope you like it too.

Click here to RSVP for TECH cocktail 3

If you are looking to find some talented employees be sure to check out TECH cocktail Special Job Board. It is FREE to post a job listing if you contact us for the promo code - give it a try. We made it to help the tech community connect with good people. We will most likely be demonstrating it at TECH cocktail 3. If you are interested in demonstrating a product at TECH cocktail 3 please let us know.

We still are looking for sponsors for TECH cocktail 3. If you are interested please let us know. Our email addresses are as follows:

frank [at] techcocktail dot com
eric [at] techcocktail dot com

We could really use the help especially since hosting a party like TECH cocktail is not free though we are able to keep it free to all guests with the help of our great sponsors. Help us help you.

For more details please stay tuned to TECH cocktail or subscribe to our feed. See you at TECH cocktail 3!

Photo Attribution: sonson on Flickr

AIM Share Links With Your Buddy List

AIM Share launched today to offer you the ability to share your favorite Somewhat Frank blog posts links or interesting stories as an alert to your entire AOL Instant Messenger buddy list. This could come in handy if you are big on sharing. Rather than clogging your friends email just ping them a link all at once via AIM Share. AIM Share offers a bookmarklet that can be added to your browser toolbar so users have easy access to the share feature from any webpage. Users can also add additional site updates into their buddy alerts by updating AIM Buddy Network settings.

Jason Calacanis who recently departed AOL had this to say of AIM Share:

"AIM Share is like AIM + Delicious.com = CRAZY DELICIOUS!"

Interesting analogy - simple yet sweet. I definitely think AIM Share could be a useful tool for both personal and professional use.

ArmChairGM A $2 Million Sports Wiki?

ArmChairGM, a sports wiki site we profiled about six months ago (June 2006) will reportedly be acquired by Wikia, a Jimmy Wales community wiki site for $2 million. Both Wikia and ArmChairGM leverage the MediaWiki, a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia.

Is a wiki site worth $2 million? This reported acquisition could validate the worth of user generated content. Alternatively, Wikia could be looking to ArmChairGM for the founders' talents to help build up the collection of Wikia communities. Congrats to ArmChairGM co-founder Aaron Wright and company on their success.

Bottom-line: ArmChairGM is a niche wiki site built on a free wiki platform reportedly set to be acquired for $2 million. In the open and free world of web 2.o product developers do not have to reinvent the wheel to be considered valuable.

Yedda: Proactively Looking For Answers

Yedda, an Israeli social knowledge sharing startup,  launched just a few months ago and takes a fresh approach to knowledge sharing online. Yedda helps answer questions online by proactively seeking and empowering people to help. Yedda does this by leveraging:

"...two patented technologies – a unique semantic analysis engine and a smarter questions distribution algorithm. These two technologies are implemented on top of a learning system which dynamically adjusts its behavior and learns real world trends (as opposed to using a fixed taxonomy)."

These technologies help to reach out to interested individuals via email or RSS in search for assistance in answering a particular question. This is definitely a unique approach as most Q & A sites wait for a grazing individual to come along and answer a question. Some sites even resort to paying users for answers. I think Yedda's strategy is a good one since I am a lot more likely return to the site to help with a question if I am contacted about it and it is an area of interest.

Yedda is organized by tags which correspond to topics of interest. Users can subscribe to various tags like web 2.0 questions for example. You might also notice that Yedda is also the only Q & A site that allows users to place HTML and images into the text of posted questions further differentiating it from the competition. Finally, Yedda offers a number of widgets that listed here and can be explained as follows:

1.) Yedda Ask Widget – Offers a new way for bloggers to communicate with their readers. Once you add this widget to your blogs, you provide your readers with a way to ask you – and everyone else who interested in your blog topics – a question.

2.   Yedda FAQ Widget – Provides fresh FAQ content to your blog based on your blog topics.

3.   My Yedda Profile Widget – Flaunt your hard-earned reputation from Yedda – your answers and your rating by displaying on your blog or web site.

Bottom-line: While there are a number of online Q & A site out there on the web, Yedda puts a fresh spin on online knowledge sharing by going out looking to people to help you find an answer. This strategy may make Yedda a winner in a highly competitive space which has surprisingly already claimed the life of Google Answers.

Snap: To Add Link Previews To Any Site

Snap an Idealab company located in Pasadena, California offers a product called Snap Preview Anywhere the ability to preview the links before you actually click them. I recently decided to add the feature to Somewhat Frank. With Snap Preview Anywhere links can be hovered over to display a thumbnail of the web site associated with the hyper-link. An example of the preview can be seen below.

Implementing the feature is a snap as you just need to add a snippet of code into your page or if you are a using WordPress you could leverage a WordPress Plug-in. Several sites are using the feature including TechCrunch, Monkey Bites and John Battelle's Search Blog - and now Somewhat Frank.

ClickStar: Movie Debuts In Your Home

ClickStar, a startup co-founded by actor Morgan Freeman and backed by many Hollywood icons, is set to launch the first ever first run movie distribution site on the web in a few weeks (December 15, 2006) with release of, 10 Items of Less. ClickStar users will be able to purchase a movie for about $20 and watch it on the computer or a TV set with the help of a add-on device. Additionally, ClickStar will enable users to play a movie while it is still downloading. Lori McCreary, ClickStar co-founder, had this to say recently in a USAToday CEO Forum:

"ClickStar is a broadband entertainment service where you can get every movie that you can get on any other broadband entertainment service, but more. We've got first-run movies while they're still in theaters, like 10 Items or Less. You also have artist-created channels, so we're working with some of Hollywood's best-known personalities that have a deep-seated interest in a particular subject. For instance, Danny DeVito is a huge fan of documentaries, so Danny will be the voice of (the channel) Jersey Docs."

With everyone and their brother jumping into the online video market ClickStar's key differentiator will be in the strength of its content. Personally, I would pay to see a first run movie in the comfort of my living room  the day it is released but some are skeptical of the opportunity. Additionally, I think there should be an option to buy to own, similar to purchasing a download to burn a DVD as $20 is about the price of a DVD these days.

Would you use ClickStar to download to watch a just released movie?

Bottom-line: If ClickStar can offer first run movie titles at the click of a button I am pretty confident that they will be successful. However, its pricing and ownership details still need to be tweaked to the liking of the general public as some companies offer users the ability to download to own the movie content to burn to a DVD the day of DVD release.

Related Articles:
ClickStar ready for movie download retake
Q&A With ClickStar's Lori McCreary
A Start-up Fueled By Star Power