SOMEWHAT FRANK

JibJab Video Includes Bloggers

JibJab, the online video site which came to fame during the 2004 U.S. presidential election with videos like "The Land," has created a new video series called the "The News" and has decided to include some bloggers. Bloggers Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo were featured around the 1:20 mark of the video below. If you squint while watching, you might catch a glimpse of my face in the crowd of people.

Jabbits For Video Answers

We all have questions at one time or another and there are number of question and answer sites like Yedda, Yahoo Answers and Askville that facilitate a simple transaction between a user, who asks a question, and the web  community, who attempts to provide an answer. Jabbits offers this same transaction but answers are provided by the web community in video format thus adding a rich experience to answers.

Some of Jabbits video answers could draw comparisons to those provided by VideoJug, a site that offers solely "how to" videos, but Jabbits question options are more open-ended thus offers a wider array of video options. Jabbits takes a question and answer site to the next level by providing rich media answers but Jabbits video sharing options were a little disappointing. For example, I could not find a way to embed an video into this article so you have to go back to the site to view video questions and answers. Unfortunately, video response also do not offer permanent links to enable linking directly to specific question and answers either. So without these two options it is very difficult to share any of the content. To the disadvantage of the product, Jabbits in not leveraging the viral benefits of video on the web.

Bottom-line: Jabbits is a user-driven question and answer site that offers answers in video format.

ThinkFree For Office Apps Online

The days of desktop office productivity software are numbered as solid web-based products have began to emerge. ThinkFree, a San Jose-based company, offers a fairly robust web-based Microsoft Office compatible application suite. ThinkFree Office Online is easy to use as it leverages users’ familiarity with Microsoft Office to offer a product made up of ThinkFree Write (word processing), ThinkFree Calc (spreadsheet), and (ThinkFree Show) presentation software. You no longer need to rely on Microsoft Office to produce documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Currently, the product is offered solely for online use; however, I had a chance to chat with ThinkFree Director of Marketing, Jonathan Crow last week at the Under the Radar: Office 2.0 event and he mentioned that users will soon be able to upgrade to a premium offering which includes offline use.

ThinkFree provides 1 GB of storage and presents a dashboard called “My Office” which offers a place for managing the suite. Each application offers quick edit mode and power edit mode for more complex formatting. With ThinkFree documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be started from scratch or uploaded directly. Items can be tagged and placed in folders for organization. ThinkFree also offers some interesting publishing options which enable any document to be shared publicly and accessible via a URL. For example, I uploaded a test document and published it here. The ThinkFree community can view, comment and rate public documents. ThinkFree DocExchange uses the community information to surfaces the most popular public documents, coolest documents and most blogged documents. 

For companies looking for an enterprise solution, ThinkFree has a Server Edition that makes it possible to run ThinkFree on a company server. To find out more about ThinkFree be sure to check out the ThinkFree blog.

Bottom-line: ThinkFree offers an online productivity suite which is very comparable to Microsoft Office.

Sloog.org Offers Social Bookmarking Mashup For Second Life Virtual World

Mapping mashups have become extremely common in the web 2.0 as developers have leverages web services to combine data with maps of Earth. I recently had a close encounter with a mapping mashup of a new kind called Sloog.org.

Sloog.org is a bookmarking service for Second Life residents and offers a unique mashup experience because rather than plotting items to a map of Earth, it plots location in the virtual world, Second Life. That's right, Sloog.org leverages a tagging infrastructure to offers users a way to search Second Life. Sloog.org is free and enables users to tag and search both places and avatars. Users (with Second Life access) can also teleport directly to visit locations bookmarked with the service. Sloog.org showcases some of the most recently visited and most popular places like Mercedez Benz Island, Virtual Morocco and Mosi-Mosi Headquarters. I did a search and found AOL Pointe, the AOL virtual real estate, and displayed the results below.

Sloog.org is a product of the Barcelona-based multimedia studio Mosi-Mosi. They are determined to make Second Life and a better place. To stay up to speed with the latest Sloog.org happenings check out the official Sloog.org blog.

Bottom-line: Sloog.org is a social bookmarking services for Second Life that offers users a great way to search and discover new parts of the virtual world.

Are You Watching Justin.tv?

Do you remember the movies EDtv and the Truman Show? Justin.tv launched just seven days ago to mimic these past reality-based movies by broadcasting Justin Kan on the web 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Justin Kan is formerly of the Ajax calendar startup, Kiko, which was funded by Y Combinator before it was eventually sold on eBay for $258,100. Justin.tv is also an Y Combinator backed venture with the long term goal:

"...to create an affordable live mobile video platform they can use to recruit other live bloggers."

The site streams Justin live, offers live chat and features some of its most popular archived content. It is no surprise, Justin.tv has been creating quite the buzz thus far as it taps into the masses general love for people watching. Unfortunately, it hasn't been all fun and games for Justin and his crew as their North Beach apartment has been subject of number of pranks.

Check out this interview with Justin below - are you watching Justin.tv?

Bzzster For Simple Sharing Via Email

Looking to send a link quickly and too lazy to send it in an email or instant message? Bzzster is a site for sharing links and recommending content with your friends over email.

Similar to Share2Me which I previously reviewed, Bzzster also offers users a bookmarklet that enables users to share a link over email without having to launching into your email application. Links sent in a nicely formatted Bzzster email but unlike Share2Me do not include thumbnail previews of each link. Bzzster offers social bookmarking by offering users the ability to expose email shared links publicly on list of links that can be on your Bzzster profile, mine can be found here, and it includes a feed. Social bookmarking sites are a dime a dozen, so it will be interesting to see if Bzzster's simple and clean approach lures people to give it a whirl. Bzzster and other similar "send to friend" sites might want to look into working with exisiting social bookmarking sites in addition to creating their own sites. For example, users could use Bzzster to send an email and also opt to submit the link directly to digg or del.icio.us all in one swipe thus saving time.

Bzzster is the creation of Jay Meattle and David Cancel both of Compete.com. You can find out more about Bzzster via the Bzzster blog and follow its every move by following Bzzster on twitter.

Office 2.0, Mobile RSS, SplashCast, Yahoo Widgets & Netvibes Updated, New TechCrunch CEO & Web Launch Strategy

Photo of the Week: The trees are blooming faster than web 2.0 startups these days. I snapped this photo, titled Flowering with my camera phone, while at the AOL Mountain View, California office this past week.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.25.07

Under the Radar Office 2.0 Winners
I had a chance to drop into the Under the Radar Office 2.0 event at Microsoft's Mountain View, California office on Friday (March 23, 2007) that showcased a number of startups in various business related software categories. This article announces the top picks in each category.

SplashCast: Channel Yourself Across the Web
SplashCast, my favorite video player widget, has made some changes which make it easier to place videos to be syndicated via RSS, in an embedded player and a number of others.

How To Market Your Web App
Read/Write Web examines the horrible peak-then-slump scenario the is common in the web 2.0 era and often happens after Digg, TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Somewhat Frank or other popular blogs spotlight a site.

Newspapers are dead...
Robert Scoble explains why newspapers are dead. I don't feel that newspapers are totally dead, as The Washington Post and a few other newspaper-based companies have been quick to adapt to the changes in the media landscape. However, the rest of pack had better realize that they need to change NOW.

Welcome To TechCrunch, Heather
TechCrunch and the Crunch Network has hired its first CEO by luring Heather Harde away from Fox Interactive Media to join the team. I had a chance to hang out with Mike Arrington this past week and he was pretty happy to have Heather on board.

SideStep and EveryClick Team Travel Searches, Charity Donations
SideStep.com just announced a partnership with EveryClick.com, a UK based search engine with social responsibility, giving 50% of gross revenues to charities. It reminds me of GoodSearch - BRAVO!

Yahoo! Launches Widgets 4.0
Yahoo! relaunched its previously named Yahoo Widget Engine with a faster, lighter, and sleeker 4.0 version.

Netvibes Launches New Version
Netvibes, the personalized homepage product, officially released its new version called the "Coriander Edition". 

Looking back at three years of Web 2.0 investing
Jeff Clavier, an established entrepreneur, offers up a glance of his impressive portfolio publicly for the first time. Thanks Jeff!

RSS on the Go: A look at Web-Based Mobile Aggregators
Want to read your feeds on the go? There are a few choices for those of us who want the same feeds accessible in both big and small formats at the same time, without requiring the download of a dedicated application on any platform. AOL also offers a mobile feed reader that was not mentioned but is an easy way to check some feeds on the go as well.

Weaving The Web To Your Taste
Hossein Eslambolchi's service will scour the web for the media you want and feeds you recommended items.

Basecamp, activeCollab, and Goplan compared
With the mention of the Goplan launch last week, I think it is appropriate to now point out this solid comparison of its competitors.

Fresh Reader - Pushing the Feed
Profy reports on a new RSS feed reader called Fresh Reader a Web based, server type RSS feed reader that runs exceptionally fast. Fresh Reader is designed for either personal or corporate use, and allows for social bookmarking, mobile support, Intranet use and many other features.

Top 40+ FeedBurner sites aggregated
Frantic Industries has manually aggregated a list of the top 40-plus sites based on FeedBurner subscriber metrics.

Shutdown Day: Take A Day Off The Grid

The amount of time we spend online is pretty insane compared to just a few years ago and I have previously written about technology addiction. So what would happen if you took a day off from your computer? Shutdown Day is looking to find out. According to the Shutdown Day web site:

"The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!"

Currently, there are 55,500+ people registered to participate in the one day computer blackout. I decided to write this article in advance so that I too could participate in a day off the grid. I hope you can do the same. The video below showcases some different activities you could do with your laptop computer on shutdown day, instead of booting it up.

Watch & Learn With Twitter

Twitter has been the talk of the blogosphere and tech community for the last few weeks. Twitter has taken a simple idea and technology to create an easy to use and somewhat addictive product thus turning it into a growing phenomenon.

I finally gave in and reviewed Twitter two weeks ago along with a number of other bloggers. Robert Scoble even convinced Mike Arrington of  TechCrunch to start using Twitter today. Upon setting up Twitter I opted to not get Twitter updates on my mobile phone. This week while in Silicon Valley, I decided to configure my profile to turn mobile updates on thinking I would stay better connected and to see just how disruptive it might be. Since turning them on, I have received hundreds of messages from all my Twitter friends.

A few things that I learned while using Twitter:

1.) Twitter can be a great connector - Twitter can be an excellent connector as I now feel I have more personal insight into all of my Twitter friend's as they offer short, usually personal, stream of conscience updates.

2.) Twitter can cause information overload - Twitter can produce lots of messages! It can be a slight distraction if you find yourself compelled to read every message that comes your way.

3.) Twitter could cost you - Twitter's SMS/text messaging update options could cost you on your mobile bill so be sure to check you mobile plan to make sure you can handle a lot more incoming text messages.

4.) Twitter is great for events - SXSW Interactive and the more recent VON conference are great examples of events that Twitter can enhance the experience as Twitter members can all Twitter the event.

5.) Twitter could be used as an alarm clock - If you have the Twitter mobile updates on you can configure some sleep hours where mobile updates are not sent. I found that doing this was a good idea. Interestingly, the time you set to resume mobile updates doubles as a wake-up call as the updates start flowing in.

6.) You can watch Twitter - Steve Rubel pointed out Twittervision which plots Twitter updates from around the globe on a map (as shown below). It could suck you in for a large chunk of time - so proceed with caution if you are short on time. Twittervision makes it easy to "people watch" and potentially meet new Twitter friends. 

What has Twitter taught you?

Photo Attribution: Ed Kohler via Flickr.

Quiz School A Digg-like Quiz Resource

I have reviewed a number of education 2.0 products like Chalksite, GradeFix, Mindpicnic and Quizlet on Somewhat Frank in the past.  I truly believe the trend towards online education  is going to continue to grow and the number of tools will continue to multiply. ProProfs, an online resource site for educators, recently contacted me to check out their latest creation called Quiz School. They even went through ReviewMe to ensure I was paid for taking a look at it - so this a sponsored reviewed of Quiz School but expect an objective opinion.

Quiz School is a new section of the ProProfs educator resource site which aims at leveraging the educational community on the web to help aggregate a healthy number of quizzes. With the goal of being both an educator and student resource for quizzes, Quiz School enables anyone to easily create quizzes on any range of topics. If education is your thing then I could see Quiz School being a handy resource as professors can use Quiz School to for quizzes that students can access without having to log-in.

Quiz School has implemented a number of web 2.0 features which include a Digg-like voting system so users can rate the quizzes that they like the best, a tagging infrastructure for categorizing quizzes for easier find-ability and comments. For additional details on the product be sure to check out this quick Quiz School video which highlights some of the features.

My only concerns about ProProfs are in the current visual design - it is not easy on the eyes. In my opinion, the site design is too text heavy and looks very "web 1.0." It reminds me of "portal in a box" solution. However that is something that can be remedied by updating the overall visual design which could vastly improve a user's first impression of the site.

This is a sponsored article.

APML Workgroup Looks To Standardize Attention Specification

Attention data is the information users give to web sites based on their interests and interactions and is a key personalization component. It is a valuable resource that reflects user interests, activities and values, and it serves as a proxy for their attention. APML or Attention Profiling Markup Language was created by Touchstone Live an attention-based company and was highlighted previously on Somewhat Frank. According to the APML website:

"APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers. The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data€“ including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests."

The APML Workgroup was recently formed which includes:

• Sam Sethi (Vecosys)
• Daniel Winterstein (ThinkTank Maths)
• Steve Williams (Programmer, Digg)
• David Cancel (Co-Founder, Compete.com)
• Richard Giles/Graeme Sutherland (Co-Founders, Scouta.com)
• Elias Bizannes
• Chris Saad/Ashley Angell (Co-Founders, Faraday Media/ Touchstone)
• Paul Jones (Senior Architect, Faraday Media/ Touchstone)
• Mitch Ratcliffe (Co-Founder, Buzzlogic)
• Chris Messina (Citizen Agency)
• Daniela Barbosa (Solutions Architect, Dow Jones)
• Phil Morle (VP Attention, Yoick)
• Ben Metcalfe (Orange/France Telecom)

The APML Workgroup is tasked with converting the current specification into an agreed standard and the group has already created a revised spec. The adoption of APML as a standard would empower users to take control of managing there attention data. APML could help create a more unified personalized experience as users jump from site to site. More information can be found on the APML website: www.apml.org. If you are interested in helping sculpt the attention economy standard be sure to contact the group.

Highrise 37signals' Contact Manager

We all have a number of contacts but how do you keep track of them all? Aside from an "old school" roledex, you could use the Microsoft Outlook or some other contact management software. 37signals silently slipped itself into the online contact manager arena with Highrise. Highrise is a simple contact management product which could be ideal for small businesses. At first glance it looks like Highrise could offer social networking like functionality in business context.

According to the Highrise web site the product was built because:

"Your address book doesn’t do enough. Traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software tries to do too much. That’s why we built Highrise. It’s the just-right, more thoughtful way to keep track of the people, conversations, and tasks that are the lifelines of your business."

In taking a quick look at the product it appeared to offer the classic 37signals design elements which makes it extremely intuitive and easy to use. 37signals offers a Highrise product tour that walks through a number of key features. Additionally, Chris Messina offers a number screen-shots of the Highrise product. Give it a try to get keep your contacts organized and let me know what you think.

Unthirsty Quenches Happy Hour Thirst

I know it is just the start of a new week but if you are looking to ease into it with a happy hour, you might want to check out Unthirsty. Unthirsty is a local happy hour search engine and directory. Unthirsty's mission is simply to connect users with the closest happy hour possible. With Unthirsty you enter your address and the site presents you with local happy hour drink and food specials on an Ajax Google map. Upon interacting with the plotted locations, drink specials and happy hour schedules appear in a bubble above the venue. For example, I searched for a happy hour in Mountain View, California and found a couple which are plotted in the screen-shot below.

If interactive maps are not your thing, Unthirsty also offers a list view of the happy hour directory. Additionally, Unthirsty offers a mobile version of the site that offers a single text box to enter a location and receive a list of the closest happy hours. This could come in handy on the road so just remember this URL: unthirsty.com/mobile. Finally, you can help Unthirsty by submitting a happy hour location.   

Hopefully, Unthirsty makes handling the start of another week a little easier - cheers!

Google Sued, Microsoft Buys TellMe, AOL Local, Last.fm Video, Attention Economy Overload & TECH cocktail 4 Coming Soon

Photo of the Week: This is a photo I took in my old neighborhood in Lincoln Park in Chicago prior to moving on to AOL in Virginia. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.18.07

Viacom Drops a $1 Billion Nuke on Google
Remember when Napster was a lawsuit target for helping to foster pirated music? When Google acquired YouTube everyone wondered who would be the first company to try and collect on video copyright infringement in a similar fashion. We now know, as Viacom was the first to step to the plate with a one billion dollar lawsuit against Google. Complete.com offers some interesting analysis on the situation.

AOL moves AOL Local Search into Beta - it's very slick
CenterNetworks reviewed the latest beta to come out of AOL. AOL Local refreshes the local options as a user moves around a map. So start in 10036 (Times Square) and move to 11235 (Brooklyn) and the options move.

Microsoft to Acquire Tellme Networks
Tellme Networks, Inc., a leading provider of voice services for everyday life, including nationwide directory assistance, enterprise customer service and voice-enabled mobile search. Microsoft and Tellme share a vision around the potential of speech as a way to enable access to information, locate other people and enhance business processes, any time and from any device.

Last.fm Adds Video Tracking
The Register reported earlier this week that social music play, Last.fm has added the ability to not only track the music you play on iTunes and other services but now is going to start doing the same with video.

Report: New Bloggers Flatlined in 2005, Reading Climbs
Steve Rubel reports that according to the latest State of the News Media report, the share of the online population that tried blogging peaked back in January 2005 at 10% and has hovered since at 8%. Blog readership, on the other hand is climbing.

The Attention Economy is Killing My Attention
Nick O'Neill explains how the attention economy may be producing information overload. He wonders how product like twitter along with blogs will be able to co-exisit as people piling on attention commitments.

Del.icio.us Adds Tag Descriptions
Del.icio.us, the popular social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo, has added a new feature which enables users to for the first time not only tag items but also add meta-data to title and describe each tag.

Goplan launches!
Webreakstuff has launched a new product called Goplan which offers a suite of online project management and collaboration tools that could draw comparisons to 37signals' product line.

TECH cocktail 4: Going, Going, Gone
TECH cocktail 4, the forth event in the event series I co-founded with Eric Olson back in July 2006, is now on its fourth event and we filled a 500 person guest list in 23 hours. Wowsers! TECH cocktail 4 will be on April 12, 2007 at John Barleycorn Wrigleyville in Chicago but due to the overwhelming response we have started a TECH cocktail 4 wait-list for anyone still interested in going. I hope to see you there.
 

Go2Web2 Blog Birthday Video

The Go2Web2 blog, written by Israel-based Orli Yakuel, is a superb blog that showcases interesting web 2.0 products a few times a week as it manually aggregates products to place in its web 2.0 directory, Go2Web20.net. The Go2Web2 blog just turned one year old yesterday (March 16, 2007) and to celebrate co-founder, Eyal Shahar decided to produce this video - it's a dandy. Happy blog birthday Go2Web2 blog!