I got a chance to chat with Greg "The Trend Junkie" Cangialosi, CEO and President of Blue Sky Factory, today regarding his new book "The Business Podcasting Book
Continue reading "Video Interview With Greg Cangialosi Author of The Business Podcasting Book" »
Brica what? BricaBox, a New York-based startup, offers a publishing platform for organizing and displaying content in a more structured manner. It's goal is to offer a way to present detailed content or data. Wondering why you might need more structure? Read on to find out how you might be able to use BricaBox.
Continue reading "BricaBox A New Kind Of Publishing Platform" »
Typepad, the popular hosted blog platform by Six Apart, has announced a new iPhone optimized interface. Typepad users can now visit http://i.typepad.com on an iPhone or the new iPod Touch in their Safari Web browser use an optimized version of Typepad. I tested it out with a brief video demo.
Though an early Twitter adopter, I found that when Facebook came out
with its open application platform which included mobile and web status
updates I stopped updating my twitter page as frequently. I just
couldn't keep up with updating two places with my status updates. When you also factor in Flickr photo uploads, myAOL 'Mix & Share' Favorites and regular blog posts (on Somewhat Frank, TECH cocktail and myAOL Blog) I had to start to looking for a way to cut corners. I recently found twitterfeed.com, thanks to my good friend Eric Olson. Twitterfeed.com turns twitter into a status feed aggregator as you can pull all your status updates together to be published on twitter.
Continue reading "Use twitterfeed.com To Aggregate Your Facebook Status Updates On Twitter" »
AdaptiveBlue, a startup that focuses on a smarter browsing experience, has created feed output for its SmartLinks functionality. This is feature called appropriately, SmartLink Feeds will make it easy for anyone to take the feed from a SmartLinks widget and display it on their blog, website or personalized homepage. SmartLinks are collected via AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer. According to AdaptiveBlue CEO, Alex Iskold:
"Anyone can create SmartLinks feeds with BlueOrganizer and instantly publish stylish lists of their favorite things."
Aside from allowing users to add their own links, AdaptiveBlue will also publish and update popular SmartLink Feeds for anyone to paste into their own sites including, New York Times Bestsellers, Netflix Top Rentals, Amazon Hot Gadgets, iTunes and others.
Photo of the Week: This photo titled WEB 2 OH is an artistic take on a license plate I spotted earlier this week.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.19.2007
Photo of the Week: Barry Bonds hit home run 755 last night in a game vs. San Diego tying Hank Aaron for most career home runs in Major League history. John Feeley was in attendance and captured history with his zoom lens in this shot (shown above).
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.05.07
Twiistup 2: 08.08.07 - Sign Up Today!
Time to for Twiistup 2, you may recall I attended Twiistup 1 on my birthday in Santa Monica, California and had a blast. If you are going to be in Venice, California this coming Wednesday (August 8, 2007) you should stop by Air Conditioned Supper Club and Twiistup too! SIGN UP HERE.
How To Become A Blogger
Stowe Boyd dishes 5 simple steps to becoming a blogger. It is a common question, I am glad he addressed it.
Facebook Meet Netvibes: Netvibes Introduces the Facebook Widget
The new Netvibes Facebook Widget launched to allow users to view their Facebook notifications and friends. You can now access your Facebook info on Netvibes, and keep up to date on what your friends are doing.
Secret New iPhone Features
Walt Mossberg points out how Apple issued its first iPhone update this week. And, while the company billed it as merely a bug-fix and security-improvement patch, in fact it has several small feature improvements that Apple hasn’t announced or documented.
FLICKR TOOLBOX: 100+ Tools For Flickr Addicts
Check out some Flickr tools that Mashable pulled together for Flickr addicts like me.
Google Mashup Editor
Read/Write Web got beta access to the new Google Mashup Editor which provides a simple interface that enables developers to make basic web applications and mashups quickly. And again, like Yahoo! Pipes, it is very definitely aimed at developers.
Reconfirmation: Flickr To Add Video
Flickr has been rumored to be adding video since August but it appears that they could do it sooner than later.
Personalize Your Site’s Content With MineKey
MineKey is a startup that makes adding personalization to any website simple through their embeddable widget.
Perform Powerful Searches Visually with SearchCrystal
searchCrystal enables you to perform powerful searches visually. Their wonderful platform makes it possible to explore and filter 50 - 500 web pages, images, videos, blogs in a single display that guides people toward relevant info in a structured way.
What Web Conferences to Attend
I wrote up a pretty extensive list of conferences worth looking into back in January. Of course a few other conferences have popped up over the last few months. Read/Write Web weighs in on the conferences to check out.
Photo of the week: These green frog cupcakes were spotted and then were quickly devoured at the most recent TECH cocktail in Chicago.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.15.07
AOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking
Nielsen/NetRatings
will begin reporting total sessions and total time spent on a site in
order to figure out site popularity putting AOL on top of the rankings
and bumping Google down to 5th.
AOL Launches Three New myAOL Products In Beta
AOL launched a suite of personalized products into
beta: myPage (personalized home page), Mgnet (image-driven content
discovery and recommendation engine) and Favorites (feed reader and
bookmarking). All three services can be accessed via tabs on the main
myAOL page.
Facebook and the Working Adult: Fad or Revolution?
Web Worker Daily investigates whether or not Facebook in the working world is just a fad or here to stay.
The Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging Tools
Tags - for some, one of the best ideas on the web, for others, merely a visual distraction. Mashable investigates a number of tagging options.
Google Adds Mapplets: Widgets for Google Maps
Google is unveiling what they’re calling “mapplets". Mapplets are essentially widgets for Google Maps which can integrate and manipulate Google with HTML, Javascript and Flash content.
The Evolution of Web Widgets: From Self-Expression to Media Companies
Read/Write
Web takes a look at how web widgets have evolved from cool, viral toys
of self-expression to important big media tools.
Basic web widget formats
Anyone publishing widget content online should know a few basic concepts shaping their decision and choose the right mix of software and content based on their target. Niall Kennedy covers some of the basic advantages, disadvantages, and considerations for each type of widget content and
bring you up-to-speed on a few current widget deployment options.
Google: Viacom's Built to Sue
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt took a swipe at Viacom Friday, saying the company was "built from lawsuits" and pointed to its litigious history. Schmidt's comments were made to reporters at a hotel bar at the annual Allen & Co. meeting of media moguls.
iPhone Hackers: "we have owned the filesystem"
This could be problematic.
Perez Hilton gets show on VH1
The
sharp-tongued celebrity gossip blogger has apparently been meeting with
someone over at VH1. Another example of how blogging creates a platform
to do just about everything.
Turning Blogging From Hobby to Career
Richard MacManus runs the world's 28th most popular blog, Read/WriteWeb, from his home office in Lower Hutt. It's every blogger's fantasy. Mr MacManus started a blog on web technology as a hobby back in 2003. Blogging can pay. Congrats Richard, keep up the great blogging!
Photo of the Week: Jen Consalvo recently snapped this photo titled backlight. A little sunshine is a beautiful thing and is good for the soul - this little yellow guy appears to agree.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 06.17.07
YouTube Remixer: Edit Videos Online At YouTube
YouTube has officially launched YouTube Remixer, a new service that allows users to edit their videos from within YouTube itself. Also, YouTube Mobile launched this week.
Discover From Megite
Megite recently launched a discover area which offers users a place to find new things via a tag cloud and other discover links.
Embedded Joost Will Change The Market
Reports that Joost is now talking to hardware vendors about embedding Joost into set-top boxes and televisions will change the market as we know it.
Me.dium Pulls $15 Million in Funding
Boulder, Colorado based Me.dium, the sidebar social network, has received $15 million in second round funding. The round of funding was led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures.
11 web technologies political campaigns should consider
Technology Evangelist points to 11 different technologies political campaign leads should know.
Google Reader losing feeds?
A few people complained this week that Google Reader lost their feeds. I didn't see it, did it happen to you?
CommunityNext July 14th: VIRAL... Catch the Fever!
The Next CommunityNext conference is coming up July 14th - are you signed up?
Stalking 2.0: The Websites that Track Your Every Move (Voluntarily!)
Are you letting people track you online? If so you probably have encountered one of these stalker 2.0 applications.
The Long Tail Is Getting Fatter
It wasn’t that long ago that 100,000 users was considered huge for a Web 2.0 related business. Today a small startup such as SpaceTime can gain those numbers in two weeks. 6 million users three years ago would have seemed an impossible dream, and yet it is very attainable now. This article takes a closer look.
Can You Make A Living Blogging?
Great question and I will have to answer with a resounding 'YES!!!' I have seen bloggers go from nothing to something as little as a six months to a year. It is pretty amazing. However, I have to agree with Nick, we don't all blog for the money...the real benefits of blogging are all the great friendships that come from it.
Schilling's Laws for Perfect Start(up)s
Seth Goldstein talks baseball and startups on Found+READ.
The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources
Check out this comprehensive post on a number of RSS tools available on the web. You may already know but I think RSS is sexy. ;)
Flickr Goes Global
Flickr opens up its doors to a number of new languages and also there is word this week that Yahoo Photos is going to be closing its doors. I'd say this is a big week for Flickr. I have a feeling Flickr video uploads are coming very soon.
Looking for a place to aggregate your thoughts in a scrapbook fashion online? Tumblr is a simple microblog platform and might be just what you are looking for to post your thoughts, images and videos. Tumblr offers a six different types of posts which include: a regular post, quote, photo, video, conversation and link. Unlike other conventional blog platforms, Tumblr does not offer comments, thus making Tumblr more like a one way log than a conversation. Eric Rice calls Tumblr a hybrid of twitter and WordPress, but it is more than just that as you can integrate a number of feeds and thus create your own customized personal aggregator.
Tumblr is a product of Davidville, the small New York web development firm that has also brought us Senduit, the simple file sharing product and Channel Frederator, the original cartoon podcast.
I created a Tumblr log called Totally Frank to aggregate my activities on Twitter, Stylehive, Last.fm and Flickr. You can find other Tumblr logs by tuning into the Tumblr Radar, an aggregation of recent Tumblr posts.
Sphere, the blog search engine that launched in May 2006, has been steadily disseminating and connecting the web via the "Sphere It" contextual widget. The widget has grown in popularity as it helps readers offer content recommendations from the blogosphere, as well as related content from current sites. It ultimately drives page views both for the author site as well as the entire blogosphere. The widget can be seen in the blogosphere on a number of popular blogs (i.e. TechCrunch, GigaOm, Andrew Sullivan Daily Dish, Publishing 2.0, Cool Hunting, Captains Quarters, Mathew Ingram, Read/Write Web, Battelle Searchblog, Venture Beat, O'Reilly Radar, Techdirt, Infectious Greed, etc).
Sphere's contextual widget is not only popping up in the blogosphere, Sphere has a number of partners (i.e. AOL, Market Watch, NYT, ZDNet and TIME among others) representing nearly a billion article page views, which means Sphere is both reaching a much broader audience of Internet readers than just the early adopter tech crowd. Ultimately, Sphere and its "Sphere It" widget helps readers discover new blogs, and in the process drives page views.
The Sphere team was recently gracious enough to create a version of the
widget for Somewhat Frank. It was added over the weekend and can be
found at the end of each article. Upon clicking the "Sphere It" link an overlay dialog box should appear with recommendations and related content as shown in the screen-shot below.
With the "Sphere It" contextual widget you can be reading Somewhat Frank and click the widget for related content. You can then click one of the recommended blogs in the lower left quadrant to jump to Read/Write Web or GigaOm and then read one of their articles and click their "Sphere It" widget to bounce to the next site. I hope you enjoy bouncing around the web discovering new sites and content with the help of Sphere and it's "Sphere It" contextual widget.
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 visit the Somewhat Frank Mobile Version but it currently is only detecting and redirecting users visiting the site with Windows CE over to the mobile version.
Eric Olson previously wrote a piece explaining how to setup a mobile version of your site leveraging the FeedBurner BuzzBoost feature and simple server level http redirects. This method works wonderfully if you have server level access. Somewhat Frank is on Typepad, the SixApart hosted blog platform, and does not enable the same server level access as host it yourself solutions. Typepad does not currently offer an out of the box mobile browser detection solution. I contacted TypePad support about it and JavaScript was mentioned as an option but no clear details were given so I found some JavaScript to handle Windows CE users. If anyone knows of other mobile redirect solutions that could be implemented on hosted blog platforms like Typepad please let me know.
Do you obsess about data? If so, Swivel might be able to help feed your obsession as it lets you explore, compare, share and upload data and graphs about politics, economics, weather, sports, business and beyond.
Swivel offers a free social-based reposistory and charting tool for interesting graphs and data sets. Users can register to upload data and create graphs. Users can also contribute ratings and comments which are used as a popularity metrics for organizational filter purposes. Graphs and data sets are organized by popularity, date and tags. If you are looking for a specific graph you can register and upload your own graph or chart. All the public data in Swivel is under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
In my explorations I found an interesting chart displaying trends in iPod sales and decided to share it by embedding it below.
Swivel launched in early December 2006 and already has over a half a million graphs created. Data-lover or not, Swivel could prove to be a handy tool for
spicing up a blog post with an interesting chart of graph.
For additional perspectives on Swivel check out these articles on PRPulp and IT Redux.
Woohoo, an AOL Pictures by-product, recently upgraded to offer a more robust Flash-based snaggable photo slideshow widget. The previous widget offered the ability to show images in a clickable stack called the photo collage as shown below or by visiting this link.
The upgraded version of woohoo offers not only the photo collage layout but five additional layouts or "woohoos" which could add interesting Flash effects to any photo slideshow. Users can customize the size, color and layout of the various widgets. By publishing the widget users receive a link to share with friends and family or HTML code which can be embedded into a blog, web site or social network page like MySpace or AIM Pages.
I would urge you to play around with each "woohoo" as all 6 are interesting visual presentation options. If you are not happy with those options woohoo offers developers the ability to customize even more of the widget. I created a custom sized woohoo slideshow with one of my favorite woohoo effect called Ken Burns. The Ken Burns effect refers to a technique of embedding still photographs in motion pictures made popular in Ken's award winning documentaries such as The Civil War and Baseball. The effect is characterized by slow zooming and panning effects, and fading transitions between images. Check it out below or visit it directly.
Bottom-line: Woohoo offers a great way to organize your AOL Picture photo in a sexy slideshow which can be shared via email or by displaying it on your blog, social network page or another web site. Woohoo!
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
